Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Thanks, Daniele Pantano and your editorial team, for publishing "Inspector Inspector." I'm honored to appear in such good company: Charlie Baylis, Satya Dash, Maria Castro Dominguez, SJ Fowler, Christine E. Hamm, Tom Pickard, Abhijit Singh, Ian Seed, Gregory Vance Smith, Helen Tookey, and Laura Wetherington. And that's just the poets. "Inspector Inspector" is the title sequence of my new Carcanet book, which will be released in August this year.

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The drug-pushers have reappeared at certain street corners of Harlem, the neighbors have complained, and the cops flex their presence with mobile posts. But the policing is lackadaisical because the cops know it's a cat-and-mouse game. More, they know there is an international network of producers, suppliers, and middlemen behind the street-corner pushers, and it is the network that must be dismantled, and not the pushers, who are often addicts and victims themselves.  Some problems appear so vast and complicated that we content ourselves by tackling their most immediate manifestations, instead of aiming at their sources. Our "solutions" fall hard on the little people, and not the powers-that-be. Worse, the problem is then blamed on the little people, thus obscuring the source of the problem and the lack of effective action on the part of the authorities. This is true of Harlem, but also of Singap...