Leigh Sugar Powerfully Confronts Love Within the Prison-Industrial Complex in “FREELAND”
The prison is not a metaphor, except when it is; the metaphor is not a prison, except when it locks you in—and the fact that these two statements can exist side-by-side, trembling with heat and contradiction, tells you everything you need to know about Leigh Sugar’s FREELAND, a book so formally clean and so emotionally feral that it feels, by the end, like pacing the perimeter of a visitation room.
To say FREELAND is “about” a relationship between a free woman and her incarcerated partner is like saying One Big Self is “about” Louisiana. It’s both accurate and insufficient, reducing themes to the subjects who express them. Sugar’s collection is more than its voices; it’s a study in the disciplinary architectures—legal, racial, aesthetic—that dictate what can be said, what can be heard, and what must be omitted entirely. These are the collection’s governing metaphors, its formal substrate.
It’s fitting, then, that the book begins with a poem called “Architecture School,” which is a building both in the formal and literal sense. Sugar writes, “I learned to clean the desk before and after laying down / the drafting paper to preserve the drafting paper’s / whiteness,” which is a line so unassuming it might pass as reportage, just a simple recollection of a student’s life. Except that what she is actually saying—what the whole poem is quietly asking you to metabolize—is that whiteness, in this book and in America, is both a color and a thing to be preserved, a thing kept safe from contact, from stain, from history, from human touch. And so the whiteness of the drafting paper becomes an object of reverence, and transparency—Phillip Johnson’s Glass House transparency, the modernist architectural ideal of seeing everything and therefore having nothing left to hide—becomes a weapon precisely because it is indistinguishable from awe.
FREELAND takes the formal qualities of modernist space—airiness, light, exposure, minimalism—and restages them as the logic of the American carceral state, which is another way of saying that FREELAND is about what happens to the erotic when it is forced to live under surveillance and what happens to surveillance when it begins to speak in the syntax of love. “What wonder—to see the thing, and through it,” Sugar writes, describing Johnson’s Glass House, but a line that can perhaps be repurposed into describing a body, the speaker’s body, the body of a beloved who has been renamed by a number. In this world, transparency is exposure, and therefore it’s the removal of shelter. It’s the glass that lets the guards see you touch your lover and the camera that turns your affection into evidence.
There are many kinds of prisons in FREELAND, but the one that matters most isn’t the Saginaw Correctional Facility in Freeland, Michigan, which lends the book its title and geography, but the prison of being too visible and also the prison of being forgotten. “Inheritance,” the early ghazal that serves as one of the book’s keystones, is about trauma, but not in the way we’re used to talking about trauma, that currency of MFA admissions and panel discussions and algorithmic memoirs. It’s about the trauma of having a name, and how even that can curdle, can rot, can become a kind of forgetting. “American name: / Zucker to Sugar,” she writes, and already we are in the territory of mistranslation, of history turned into brand. What Sugar understands—and what she understands formally, which is rarer—is that the ghazal’s obsessive return, the radif’s relentless refrain, is the experience of trying not to forget who you are.
He says, Leigh, I dream I’ve forgotten my number
and wake to realize I’ve forgotten my name.
By the time the maqta arrives—“He says, Leigh”—we are not in the domain of self-assertion, but in the far more fragile domain of being named by someone else, which, in this book, is privilege. To be addressed is to exist. To have a name in someone’s mouth is to remain, however briefly, outside the forgetting. And so the speaker becomes the object of the sentence, and in doing so acquires a strange kind of sovereignty: she exists not because she names but because she is named. This, too, is love under surveillance. This, too, is a prison.
But if naming can be tender in one poem, it can be carceral in the next. In “A Number Is Just a Name,” Sugar stages a central contradiction in the book: the prison ID number, 619754, is an identifier, the digits that replace all the informal names that lovers use when they are still allowed to touch each other. The T-shirt she receives—white, of course—has the number printed at the bottom, which is to say the number is made visible against the field of whiteness, which is to say the incarcerated body becomes legible only when it is rendered on white. The body becomes contraband. He is, quite literally, an object lesson.
And what does it mean to love an object lesson? What does it mean to want, really want, someone who has been institutionalized by both the state and your own need to explain yourself to the page? FREELAND never stops asking this, which is why it never becomes cathartic. It doesn’t release you. If anything, the book implicates the reader in the same surveillance system it tries to resist, because by the time you’re deep in “Corrections,” the book’s sonnet crown (one for each year of his sentence, in case you thought metaphor was dead), you begin to feel the repetition as carceral affect. You are trapped in the logic of recall, of retelling, of remembering the forgetting. “I confess I want to leave and leave you there,” she writes. It is the honesty of that line—the double leaving—that marks Sugar as one of the most serious poets of our time.
This would be the part, normally, where I’d tell you about the poet: that Leigh Sugar once taught creative writing in prisons, that she earned an MPA in criminal justice alongside her MFA, that she edited the prison-writers anthology That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It, that she learned to write by writing to her incarcerated partner, that she has lived the experience from which she is writing. But to say all this, while true, would be to imply that biography is what gives the book its authority. It’s not. FREELAND’s authority is its refusal to sentimentalize the things we normally reach for when poetry fails—love, memory, justice. Sugar knows that all of those are lies, or at least insufficient, fraught with the same power dynamics they claim to repair. “I want a poetry / … / that investigates love / how it is not enough,” she writes. And it is that failure—that precise, unflinching failure—that becomes the book’s achievement.
And so I finish FREELAND the way I imagine Sugar finishes each letter she sends to a place called Freeland that has no freedom in it: trembling, nauseous, grateful, and still, unbelievably, in love.
Rishi Janakiraman is a poet and essayist who writes from Raleigh, NC. He has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Urban Word, Young Poets Network, Bow Seat, and Best of SNO. A Top 15 Foyle Young Poet of the Year, his work has been published in The New York Times, The Poetry Society, Rust + Moth, and Dishsoap Quarterly, among others. He serves as the Co-Editor-In-Chief of Polyphony Lit and as the NC Youth Poet Laureate.