A law professor who has represented prisoners in U.S. custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has edited a book of their poems that is set to be published this summer by the University of Iowa Press.

The 84-page volume, Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, was edited by Marc Falkoff, an assistant professor at the Northern Illinois University College of Law. He collected 22 poems gathered by lawyers representing detainees.

According to the Reuters news agency, some of the poems were originally scratched into foam beverage cups with pebbles, and had to be recreated from memory when the cups were confiscated. The poems had to be approved by military censors — who Mr. Falkoff said prevented publication of many others — and could be translated into English only by translators with U.S. security clearances.

The collection attracted cover blurbs from the poet Adrienne Rich and from Robert Pinsky, the former U.S. poet laureate. But a Pentagon spokesman said the detainees’ poems were “another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies against whom they are at war.” —Lawrence Biemiller