She unearthed Jane's journals, and conducted innumerable hours of research in order to write what was to become a collage of poetry, prose and documentary sources – words designed to "disrupt the tabloid, 'page-turner' quality of the story".
This tension, involving race and class and the issue of belonging, occupies the heart of "Citizen," a vivid hybrid of verse, narrative prose and documentary images that reframes, among others, the stories of Trayvon Martin, Mark Duggan and Zinedine Zidane to ruminate on public and private identity.
And the first-person, rather documentary prose of a subsequent prize-winning novel, "War Trash" (2004), flows as smoothly.
Here, although he saw himself as a poet, it was the melody of his documentary prose that marked him out.
"Yo, el supremo weaves a plethora of formats into a single work: history, novel, sociological essay, moral philosophy, biographical novel, revolutionary pamphlet, testimonial documentary, poetic prose, autobiographic confession, ideological debate over literary limits, and linguistic treatise on the limits of verbal expression".
The black-and-white photographs possess the neutrality of a documentary, and the prose has the laconic tone of the explorer's diary in which even the most hair-raising adventures are recounted with deliberate understatement.
This painstaking, thoughtful documentary unfolds like a prose poem, a melancholy and exquisite observation about the grim dullness that constituted many soldiers' days.
Drawing on hard facts but fleshed out with speculative characterisation, frequently conveyed through feverish prose or the borrowed authority of documentary evidence, these books sit uneasily on the borderline between writerly imagination and licensed voyeurism.
Unlike standard biographies, this one reads like a prose version of a superbly rendered documentary, in the style of Ken Burns.
