Overview

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.

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9781949944730

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Reviews

""Readers of FREELAND will likely find themselves contemplating the structures, including language, that seek to render the realities and experiences of incarcerated people invisible."" --William Ward Butler, Bear Review ""In these forceful, freewheeling, and formally inventive poems Leigh Sugar dramatizes what it's like to stand on the outside looking in, to be in a relationship with someone who is incarcerated, to live within a love confined by the state. FREELAND is a haunted and haunting book that won't let you look away. It left me shaken and moved."" --Edward Hirsch ""FREELAND is a vibrant conjuring of a kinder, wiser world. In these magnificently concise and surprising poems, Leigh Sugar maps the many paths connecting grief to compassion. Her generosity of spirit manifests in every poem."" --Idra Novey ""FREELAND is a book in which possibility is with every word measured against reality, and though with every word reality is shown to fall short, the poems never collapse into fantasy, even when fantasy is described--it is a book that recognizes possibility is the biggest and most crucial part of reality. And because it sees the world so clearly, FREELAND is a lament, and because it says what it sees so directly, FREELAND instills its ache."" --Shane McCrae

""In these forceful, freewheeling, and formally inventive poems Leigh Sugar dramatizes what it's like to stand on the outside looking in, to be in a relationship with someone who is incarcerated, to live within a love confined by the state. FREELAND is a haunted and haunting book that won't let you look away. It left me shaken and moved."" --Edward Hirsch ""FREELAND is a vibrant conjuring of a kinder, wiser world. In these magnificently concise and surprising poems, Leigh Sugar maps the many paths connecting grief to compassion. Her generosity of spirit manifests in every poem."" --Idra Novey ""FREELAND is a book in which possibility is with every word measured against reality, and though with every word reality is shown to fall short, the poems never collapse into fantasy, even when fantasy is described--it is a book that recognizes possibility is the biggest and most crucial part of reality. And because it sees the world so clearly, FREELAND is a lament, and because it says what it sees so directly, FREELAND instills its ache."" --Shane McCrae

""Readers of FREELAND will likely find themselves contemplating the structures, including language, that seek to render the realities and experiences of incarcerated people invisible."" --William Ward Butler, Bear Review ""In these forceful, freewheeling, and formally inventive poems Leigh Sugar dramatizes what it's like to stand on the outside looking in, to be in a relationship with someone who is incarcerated, to live within a love confined by the state. FREELAND is a haunted and haunting book that won't let you look away. It left me shaken and moved."" --Edward Hirsch ""FREELAND is a vibrant conjuring of a kinder, wiser world. In these magnificently concise and surprising poems, Leigh Sugar maps the many paths connecting grief to compassion. Her generosity of spirit manifests in every poem."" --Idra Novey ""FREELAND is a book in which possibility is with every word measured against reality, and though with every word reality is shown to fall short, the poems never collapse into fantasy, even when fantasy is described--it is a book that recognizes possibility is the biggest and most crucial part of reality. And because it sees the world so clearly, FREELAND is a lament, and because it says what it sees so directly, FREELAND instills its ache."" --Shane McCrae

"""In these forceful, freewheeling, and formally inventive poems Leigh Sugar dramatizes what it's like to stand on the outside looking in, to be in a relationship with someone who is incarcerated, to live within a love confined by the state. FREELAND is a haunted and haunting book that won't let you look away. It left me shaken and moved."" --Edward Hirsch ""FREELAND is a vibrant conjuring of a kinder, wiser world. In these magnificently concise and surprising poems, Leigh Sugar maps the many paths connecting grief to compassion. Her generosity of spirit manifests in every poem."" --Idra Novey ""FREELAND is a book in which possibility is with every word measured against reality, and though with every word reality is shown to fall short, the poems never collapse into fantasy, even when fantasy is described--it is a book that recognizes possibility is the biggest and most crucial part of reality. And because it sees the world so clearly, FREELAND is a lament, and because it says what it sees so directly, FREELAND instills its ache."" --Shane McCrae"

Featured by Poets & Writers ""Page One."" ""I'm intrigued by the narrative tensions that Sugar achieves, layering multiple story-elements across carved, crafted lines, allowing the multiple narrative threads an interplay..."" --Rob Mclennan ""In this impactful collection, Leigh writes about the U.S. mass incarceration system, whiteness, both within race and architectural design, and the struggle of sustaining identity and love within the prison industrial complex."" --Cid Galicia, The Good Life Review ""Readers of FREELAND will likely find themselves contemplating the structures, including language, that seek to render the realities and experiences of incarcerated people invisible."" --William Ward Butler, Bear Review ""In these forceful, freewheeling, and formally inventive poems Leigh Sugar dramatizes what it's like to stand on the outside looking in, to be in a relationship with someone who is incarcerated, to live within a love confined by the state. FREELAND is a haunted and haunting book that won't let you look away. It left me shaken and moved."" --Edward Hirsch ""FREELAND is a vibrant conjuring of a kinder, wiser world. In these magnificently concise and surprising poems, Leigh Sugar maps the many paths connecting grief to compassion. Her generosity of spirit manifests in every poem."" --Idra Novey ""FREELAND is a book in which possibility is with every word measured against reality, and though with every word reality is shown to fall short, the poems never collapse into fantasy, even when fantasy is described--it is a book that recognizes possibility is the biggest and most crucial part of reality. And because it sees the world so clearly, FREELAND is a lament, and because it says what it sees so directly, FREELAND instills its ache."" --Shane McCrae

Featured by Poets & Writers ""Page One."" ""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."" --Rishi Janakiraman, Sontag Mag ""I'm intrigued by the narrative tensions that Sugar achieves, layering multiple story-elements across carved, crafted lines, allowing the multiple narrative threads an interplay..."" --Rob Mclennan ""In this impactful collection, Leigh writes about the U.S. mass incarceration system, whiteness, both within race and architectural design, and the struggle of sustaining identity and love within the prison industrial complex."" --Cid Galicia, The Good Life Review ""Readers of FREELAND will likely find themselves contemplating the structures, including language, that seek to render the realities and experiences of incarcerated people invisible."" --William Ward Butler, Bear Review ""In these forceful, freewheeling, and formally inventive poems Leigh Sugar dramatizes what it's like to stand on the outside looking in, to be in a relationship with someone who is incarcerated, to live within a love confined by the state. FREELAND is a haunted and haunting book that won't let you look away. It left me shaken and moved."" --Edward Hirsch ""FREELAND is a vibrant conjuring of a kinder, wiser world. In these magnificently concise and surprising poems, Leigh Sugar maps the many paths connecting grief to compassion. Her generosity of spirit manifests in every poem."" --Idra Novey ""FREELAND is a book in which possibility is with every word measured against reality, and though with every word reality is shown to fall short, the poems never collapse into fantasy, even when fantasy is described--it is a book that recognizes possibility is the biggest and most crucial part of reality. And because it sees the world so clearly, FREELAND is a lament, and because it says what it sees so directly, FREELAND instills its ache."" --Shane McCrae

Author Information

LEIGH SUGAR is a writer, editor, and educator. Her debut poetry collection Freeland is forthcoming from Alice James Books in June 2025. Sugar is an associate producer for Rachel Zucker's poetry podcast Commonplace and the creator/editor of That's a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Settings (New Village Press, 2023). She has taught many courses and workshops at sites such as the Institute for Justice and Opportunity and Justice Arts Coalition, and her work is widely published in print and online. Sugar holds an MFA in poetry from NYU, a Master of Public Administration specializing in Criminal Justice Policy from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and is a University of Michigan Hopwood Writing Awardee. She lives in Michigan with her pup.

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