Leigh Sugar’s debut poetry collection, FREELAND, is equal parts gripping love story and confessional. With narrative, lyrical, and structurally experimental poems, Sugar offers a rare, nuanced take on the prison landscape as only one intimately acquainted with it can. Throughout the three formal sections of FREELAND, which are further split into their own micro sections, she shows us the claustrophobic, charged interior of a Michigan state prison visiting room with her incarcerated beloved and the overwhelming unknowns and possible futures for her life on the outside.
Posing and grappling with questions of identity, connection, timing, and time itself, FREELAND offers insight into the political, social, and physical divides distinctive to the U.S. mass incarceration machine. Sugar’s account is generous and refreshing in its honesty and straightforward advocacy, and invites us to reconsider all we’ve been taught about crime, punishment, and justice. By sharing her personal relationship to the merciless carceral system, she also reveals important truths about love realized, deferred, and transformed by circumstance and choice.
Sugar previously interviewed me for Electric Literature about my debut memoir in verse, Disappearing Act, which detailed my own experience navigating a loved one’s incarceration. It was a privilege to continue the conversation and shine a light on the captivating story behind FREELAND.
Jiordan Castle: I was moved by many of our shared experiences: the microwaveable cheeseburgers in the visiting room, how funds and wages work for (and against) incarcerated people, and the automated warning before a time-constrained phone call ends. How did you decide what snapshots of the prison landscape to share and what to leave out, or save, for yourself?
Leigh Sugar: I think a lot of FREELAND is the result less of decision than of urgency and intuition. There are so many recurring memories, so much recurring scenery in the experiential dirge of prison; the violence of unending repetition, and the confusing comfort of it. So many aspects of the visiting process are predictable—not just the security process, but also the sounds, visuals, and even feelings. The specific imagery is what comes to mind—and into my imagination—first and most readily when I think of going to the prison. The snacks in the vending machine were generally always the same, and certain foods are more popular than others. I very explicitly remember Gold Peak brand iced tea, and still can’t buy a bottle. More general items like tables and chairs—though clearly “institutional” in the prison setting—are less vivid in my memory, as they are more ubiquitous in my life beyond prison.
I also tried, as much as possible, to maintain the perspective of FREELAND as my own; to not attempt to adopt the experience of someone actually incarcerated—which I’m not, and never have been. This feels important given the power differential between myself and those who are incarcerated. More specifically, I know many incarcerated folks who are writers and artists themselves, and they are the ones who should write and share their experiences (if they want to). FREELAND can only account for my experience, one as a “free” person who has statistically-unusual access to some of the goings-on in prison. The images and moments I chose to include, like the phone call, are the ones that felt most oppressive to me in their persistence and predictability. They also felt most provocative and ripe for probing.
During the initial drafting of many of these poems, “craft” wasn’t necessarily a determining factor in “choosing” imagery. More so, I followed my gut, my memory, my recurring dreams. Architect Mies Van Der Rohe is often attributed with the term “God is in the details,” and often us writers are encouraged to focus on detail, rather than general references, in order to get at what may in fact be more universal. Perhaps in this case, the inversion of Van Der Rohe’s epithet is more fitting: “The devil is in the details.” At any rate, these “details” were a matter of instinct, and then when it came to assembling the manuscript, observing recurring moments and figuring out how to piece them together into reappearing images and themes became more clear.
JC: I love the work different fantasies are doing in this collection. The speaker’s, that of the speaker’s beloved, and all those fantasies that stem from the physical and psychological fact of incarceration. Why is fantasy essential (and sometimes painful) in prison life and for those who are prison-adjacent?
LS: I have a very active “what if” life in my mind. I am often ashamed of this (cue all suggestions to “live in the moment”) but the process of writing FREELAND, and subsequently reflecting on it, has revealed the self-preservation instinct behind many fantasies. Without imagination, how can we achieve change? Imagination allows us to picture a reality different from the one we experience, and I find it to be a critical skill in service of reaching toward a more just world.
Without imagination, how can we achieve change?
I don’t think I realized at the time how heavily I was relying on fantasy to propel not only the romantic relationship, but also my engagement with the legal system as a whole. At the risk of seeming naive, the legal system is vast and inextricably connected to myriad other oppressive systems, but if I focus too much on the largeness of the system and my own smallness, any effort feels futile. What else can I do but believe that what I, we, say matters? The stories we tell. The futures we imagine, even when imagination reveals the painful distance between current reality and a more humane possibility.
JC: In FREELAND, you don’t shy away from sensuality, sex, and romance as confined to the visiting room and phone calls. Historically, I think it’s been a bit taboo to write about sexuality as it relates to incarcerated people. In large part, I believe, because of the sexual violence associated with prison. Why was it important to share that part of your experience?
LS: Honestly, when writing the individual poems, this didn’t even occur to me. I felt I was documenting our experience, which had an inherent sexually charged tension. An instructor actually, in the early stages of this manuscript, suggested I hold back on some of the sex, saying it was getting to be a little “too much.” It made me quite self-conscious at the time. Now, years later, I’m curious about this feedback. What was “too much”? There is sex, sexuality, intimacy, graphic descriptions of sex—and all the feelings and situations surrounding it—in so many poems and collections. Why was the sex in mine striking this instructor as “too much”?
Was it boring? Did the tension become stale when the sex could never be fully realized in a normative sense? Was it uncomfortable to think about an incarcerated person expressing their sexuality and sensuality (to the extent that they are “allowed” and able)? Or to be confronted with the realities of what an intimate relationship between an incarcerated person and a non-incarcerated person might entail? Why?
JC: It felt to me like a kind of reclamation. I appreciated the truth of being a body in the world, especially when someone’s physical world may be confined within a prison.
LS: Though the topic is still taboo, it is much less taboo for me—a white, petite, non-incarcerated person—to write about my sexuality than it is for an incarcerated person, particularly an incarcerated person of color. Especially given the social correlations between incarceration, white supremacy, and the associated bigotry of Black male sexuality.
JC: We mentioned the phone call between the speaker and the former beloved, but what’s perhaps most telling is that it takes place right after the 2016 election. You deftly showcase the privilege of having access to varied news sources while trying to sympathize and advocate for someone who doesn’t even retain the right to vote. With FREELAND taking place largely in the past but being published early on in a second Trump term, how do you contextualize that phone call now?
LS: The phone call was a pretty straight transcription from our actual conversation, with some stylistic shaping. I think I knew instinctively that something interesting was happening in our dynamic, but at the time couldn’t quite identify what that was. When I look at it now, I sense a lot of tension in the speaker’s desire to connect with the beloved about the fear and desperation she, I, was feeling, while simultaneously realizing that, first, he didn’t have access to any news sources beyond select TV news channels, and thus was not privy to experiential “feel” of the city, nor direct stories from friends and acquaintances. And second, that this lack of access was upsetting to me, not because it was his fault but rather another consequence of the state’s system.
JC: In both of our books, you and I give select insight into the crimes our loved ones were charged with. It’s a difficult move, but an important one, I think, if only to show that there are no “perfect” crimes or prisoners, only an imperfect system. How did you determine what you were allowed (or allowed yourself) to disclose?
LS: I started writing the poems that would become FREELAND over ten years ago, so my relationship to the work now is very different from when I began. In recent months and years, I started to notice an unsettled worry—that I did not consider the feelings of the family, friends, and the beloved that appear in the collection.
However, when I recall the writing process, I remember how careful I felt in navigating this space; how worried I was about portraying someone in an unsavory light. I tried, as much as possible, to make the book about me: my relationship to prison—as well as a bit of the history and context that created the environment for me to be involved in prison work—rather than about anyone else, particularly the beloved. He and I had many conversations throughout FREELAND’s evolution and editing. He’s read all the poems and granted permission to publish, which felt like the most important permission to request.
In general, I found it important to self-implicate; not represent myself as “bad,” but show my very honest belief that we are all capable of doing—and receiving—great harm (to paraphrase adrienne maree browne). One of the most important tenets I’ve come to believe is that I am not different, fundamentally, from a person who has become incarcerated.
JC: You also edited the 2023 anthology, That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It, which contains poetry and prose from writers who’ve taught workshops in U.S. carceral institutions. There’s a lot to consider in both collections about resisting the “savior” trope. Did you take anything away from editing that anthology that helped shape the final version of FREELAND?
LS: It’s much easier to gawk at horror stories than to confront the possibility that we are, or that I am, capable of some of the same behaviors. We are all people. I’ve caused harm. I’ve been harmed. One of the projects of incarceration is to separate and invisibilize large swathes of the population. In order to do so, the incarcerated must be “othered.”
JC: Your book reminded me how acutely the future can become something to fear or even deny in order to survive the present when someone you love is in a place where time stands still. Did the relationship with your former beloved, incarcerated throughout the course of your romance—and after the fact—inform how you think about or experience time?
LS: Woof, this is such a big and observant question, because my experience of time is very impacted by this experience and by my work in prisons. I’ve worked with people who were released from prison at 36, already having served 20 years. I’m 35 as of July; this is young. My sense of “expected” timelines and milestones has been completely subverted. I’ve witnessed the way a person can step out of prison after decades, never having seen a smartphone, and within 5 years be married with a college degree and a mortgage.
So much fear of the future is fear of the unknown; what the future will be, or what it won’t be (i.e., a future in which dreams aren’t realized).
JC: We’re both white women of Jewish heritage, and as such, not one of the demographics most commonly and consistently affected by incarceration. Who, what, are we serving by sharing our stories?
LS: Like Solmaz Sharif’s quote, “There is nothing / that has nothing to do with this,” I really do believe that we are all connected, and that whether or not I hold a certain historically oppressed identity, I am never a “witness.” Witness suggests a continuation of the “other,” that there is a person or group that is enduring a given situation (in this case, incarcerated folks), and that the rest of us who are not incarcerated are just outside of the issue. This is not true.
Witness suggests that the rest of us who are not incarcerated are just outside of the issue. This is not true.
The United States’ mass incarceration system—any carceral system, really—only benefits from this false sense of division. It is easier to stomach, or perhaps forget entirely, the knowledge that tens of thousands of people exist in our very human, very fallible, very racist-classist-ableist-heteronormative-patriarchal-capitalist – communities—when they are simply locked away and invisibilized. Especially when we feel there is some grand difference between people who are incarcerated and people who are not. Division and separation are carcerality’s tools and props.
Understanding—and accepting—that is critical to my understanding of hegemonic structure in general, and the once quieter (and now not at all quiet) fascism that has always run this country. There are reasons why, say, my former beloved, or others I’ve met in prison, are incarcerated and I am not. But these reasons are based on systemic and institutional racism, classism, and other oppressive systems. It would be far more uncommon for me—a white, educated, non-immigrant, cis-gendered woman, who for all intents and purposes satisfies “normative” expectations of citizenship—to be incarcerated. The facts of my access to financial and legal resources (combined with my race, appearance, family history, and other factors) would render a serious case with the justice system very unlikely, even though I am disabled, neurodivergent, and experience mental illness.
JC: The collection ends with a final reflection in the form of the poem, “Revision.” You write: “I thought abandoning the reach / meant longing won…” Did writing and publishing FREELAND change how you see the version or versions of yourself that lived these poems?
LS: “Revision” is actually the last poem I wrote (in a workshop with Leila Chatti!). It, like several other poems in the collection, radically changed my understanding of myself, the relationship, and my writing. I did not know what was going to happen as I wrote the poem, and when the end revealed itself, I knew immediately this was the end of the book.
I am a very obsessive person; this relationship was a perfect receptacle for obsessive thought and action, as the possibility for fantasy, imagination, and future-tripping was endless. I never ran out of possibilities or scenarios to consider. However, by the time I wrote “Revision,” two years had passed from the end of the romantic part of our relationship, and about the same amount of time since I’d even looked at the manuscript. It felt fitting that the final poem turns back inward—to serve as a reminder that many of the extremely intense feelings I experienced in the relationship weren’t entirely due to the prison’s separating force; that feelings of longing, loneliness, and sadness may be universal, and wouldn’t be “resolved” by a climactic release from prison and the ability to “start our lives for real.” This is our life. This is not to downplay the role of prison, but more to acknowledge the parts of me that have always been present. Simultaneously critical and exacting, while also deeply empathetic and concerned about the world and my place in it. Furthermore, the poem seemed to tug at threads that other poems in the book certainly touched on, but perhaps didn’t fully explore. My experiences of loneliness and feeling misunderstood—these are my experiences, with or without the prison. The prison had become a great and obvious object on which to project these feelings, but they still remained once I was in a different situation.
Now, this does not negate the reality that I “got” to leave, or could choose to go, while the former beloved—and everyone else incarcerated—cannot. This is, again, where I return to my intention with the book: to remain, as much as possible, in my own vantage, my own life. This was my experience. This is not the experience, necessarily, of someone getting out of prison. This is not the experience of the former beloved. It was my own journey in understanding some core aspects of myself that I had previously been able to attribute to the forces of prison but ultimately couldn’t deny that these were lifelong obsessions of mine that would persist regardless of my life’s specifics. This, too, helps me conceptualize and believe in the connectedness between those of us in prison and those of us outside of prison. The experiences and feelings from the relationship were real, and I would’ve struggled with feelings of loneliness regardless of the circumstances. This is not to take power away from the oppressive force of the prison, but more to acknowledge the universality of experience.
JC: Prison takes. Does it give anything back?
LS: Oof. This feels a bit like a trick question. If I say “yes,” am I endorsing something about prison? Am I suggesting that what it may “give” makes it “worth it”? No. Nothing is worth the carceral system.
And, given that our current world does operate a carceral system (many carceral systems, but the scope of FREELAND is limited to the state prison), I’ll answer in the context of this reality. Prison, if understood through a lens of social control, can remind us that the lines between good and bad, right and wrong, are far more blurry than many of us care to admit. To fully realize this blur forces us to account for the harm we ourselves have caused, and consider what is the difference between that and harm (and punishment) that has been legislated by the state?
Are there possibilities for allowing each other, and ourselves, to live freely that we haven’t yet explored? Or that are masked by the seeming inevitability of prison. Once we start asking these questions, a whole world of possibility opens. Perhaps I’ll leave it there: the existence of prison can serve as a stark object against which we—as a national community all the way down to our relationships with ourselves—can measure our own capacity for acknowledging harm and devise ways to address it that both honor the survivor (or a victim’s family) as well as continue to recognize the humanity of all involved. A terrible reminder of how far from the prison system we hope to—and can, I believe—move.
