Freeland

Traversing an impossible love story, Leigh Sugar’s debut collection, Freeland examines the unbreakable bond between the author and an incarcerated writer. Drawing critical connections between her personal and familial history, the Jewish diaspora, the racial imaginary of whiteness, and the philosophical and literal evolution of the prison machine, Leigh Sugar obsessively searches form and language to communicate what happens in the U.S. mass incarceration system. Refreshing and honest narrative poems follow the gradual dissolution of a once intense love that begins to blur amidst the constant crush of the speaker’s loneliness. How do you choose between loving someone who exists in your life only in shadow, and walking away, knowing they don’t have the same choice? Expanding out to touch on her own experiences with mental illness and disability, Freeland is a devastating and urgent testimony of love across the physical, political, and social boundaries of the prison industrial complex, interrogating questions of abolition, race, solitude, and memory in poems that simultaneously embody and resist formal structures.