Category: book review

In the introduction to poet Terry Belew’s debut poetry collection, The Deep Blue of Neptune, winner of the 2024 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, judge Alison Hawthorne Deming writes, “For Terry Belew, the local is in the lens through which the universal struggles of our mortal condition can be seen.” Throughout these poems, Belew’s speaker wrestles with grief from his past and for the future in rural America, through its guns, whiskey, solitude, and all its nuances and complexities. 

Belew’s writing is grounded in a place where wildlife and rodents make their way into the speaker’s childhood, where violence and survival intermingle with beauty and regret. In the litany poem, “Wish List for a Deity,” Belew writes:

            Forgive my vices and replace my thoughts 
with an iPhone… 

Forgive me 
            for shooting a mostly road-killed raccoon – 

too precious to stay half-dead in the road – 
            in the face.

Belew mixes sarcasm and humor with a raw empathy for animals and life around him, causing him to plead, “Please tell me which way to live” in the last line of the poem. Figuring out how to live with tragedy and confusion all around is at the center of many of the poems in this collection. 

A similar moment reveals itself in “Pest Control,” where the speaker’s dad “filled a Shop-Vac quarter-full of water / and stuck the hose / into the mouse hole” followed by the speaker and his brother shooting the mice “with pellet guns, their lead-riddled / bodies writhing until laying / still as frost’s mercy.” The pain in these images shows an environment where a cacophony of unwanted sounds bleeds into the poet, who stacks these moments together to create the narrative. There is a wildness in the setting that the speaker frequently tries to cope with, and the poetic meandering style with silences across sections of the page imitates this content. 

Belew’s poems begin in intimate spaces, such as in a backyard garden of melons or in the waiting room of a hospital with his son. Yet the poems always expand outward to larger topics to be contended with, such as death, poverty, social media, and parenthood. In the poem “Animal Science,” after describing a police officer pulling over a girl whom he has pulled over before “because he knows about her / fentanyl…”, Belew writes:

… I know
of no other animal that keeps poisoning 

itself, Sodium Nitrate and Yellow #5,
                        cheeseburgers and bourbon, the constant
            stream of shootings in the news

                        reminding me I’m alive.

Over and over, there is tenderness riding beneath each image. Belew’s word choice is playful in sound and careful in building enjambment and wonder. 

Belew also recalls and reflects upon traumatic stories, including the murder of a friend in the poem “For Certain.” He admits, “This isn’t my story to tell,” though through the details of memories he had with this friend, the last time he talked to him, and the details he discovered about his death make the situation his own. He writes:

The last time I spoke to him, we were ordering
                   Chinese for our families near the town
we grew up in. We talked about playing music

                   ten years ago, his rapping snare, double kick
drums, my Telecaster plugged into a now-sold
                   half-stack, both of us trying and failing to stay in time.  

The idea of “trying and failing to stay in time” is experienced in other poems that bring readers into the speaker’s childhood, such as “Trash Pile,” where a child “wanted to see an aerosol can / explode”, causing his younger brother to end up in the hospital. Upon his return, “his face was scarred as war metal…” and the speaker reflects, “Now, when something detonates / at the neighbors’, I smell / burnt flesh, chlorofluorocarbon, / think of the boy’s lipless smile.” 

Belew’s use of imagery highlights his capacity to notice the anger and guilt for the way we live, whether due to recklessness, and dreams we lose sight of when we notice our over-reliance on technology, which he explores in the poem “Wish List While Reading the News on my Phone,” where he begs, “Find me stupid / videos so I laugh, because the news / is someone killing another…” We can relate to finding ways to avoid the tragedies around us, to avoid the absences we feel in our lives. 

Belew explores his landscape through sestinas, sonnets, list poems, and free verse lyrics that pay close attention to sound and movement across the page. Central to the collection’s architecture are Belew’s three stunning sestinas – “The Anatomy of Envy,” “The Anatomy of the Cold,” and “The Anatomy of Forgiveness.” These poems punctuate the book with contemplation on selfhood and parenthood, as well as conflicts between nature and society. And despite all our struggles, there is language, there is the lyric, and there is The Deep Blue of Neptune.

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Terry Belew lives in rural Missouri. He received his MFA from the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where he won the 2022 and 2023 Helen W. Kenefick Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Recent work can be found in journals such as Meridian, Southern Humanities Review, Storm Cellar, Gulf Stream, and Tar River Poetry, among many others. 

The Deep Blue of Neptune is available at Kent State University Press, and on Amazon.

The Matrix is a system, Neo, and that system is our enemy. Unfortunately, no one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself

–-Morpheus (The Matrix)

Everyone keeps trying to tell me how my stories supposed to go. Nah…Ima do my own thing.

–-Miles Morales (Across The Spider-Verse)

Navigating Pollock’s collection, ALL THE POSSIBLE BODIES, is a literary collision of The Matrix and The Spider-Verse. Like Morpheus trying to explain dual realities to Neo and Jefferson Davis (Dad) trying to guide Miles Morales (Spider-Man) through the internal war of becoming a hero, in a world that sees you as the enemy.  

In The Matrix, humans have become immobile mammalian batteries being fed by streaming videos of a fictional reality. The spirit of humanity, ingested and consumed, so that those in power can remain there comfortably and unabated. Unfortunately, that story is too close to reality and in the opening poem from Pollock’s collection, A BLACK MOTHER’S CHILD CONSIDERS HIS LOST DREAM OF IMMORTALITY, he reminds us of this through an early story of his mother.

My mother wanted to learn Latin on her way
to Greek, but the teachers had her pegged
to cook and sew…

They thought she should scurry
about the rooms of your house, America, picking up
what you had dropped. But she overcame to stand
at the front of a room, professor of language
and myth…

America, you have eaten your children
to keep your place on the honeyed mountaintop.
If you have not already, you will consume these children
too. And still you will come, with wild, ravenous hunger,
for more. And why do you keep doing what you do?

The administrators and teachers there wanted to download their virus into her, but her father would not hear it, and used the athletic prowess to to deny those in power and push for her to have the option to select her own position. 

Into The Spider-Verse and Across The Spider-Verse are the most recent reincarnations of The Spider-Man Saga and in this animated alternate universe, Spider-Man is a teenager of mixed race with a Black Father and Puerto Rican Mother. His father is a cop and his mother a nurse. The father is constantly trying to protect and love his young spiderling, but there is constant unspoken pushback and conflict. This thematic vein pulses through Pollock’s collection as well. Pollock writes on his observations of his older and younger sons, with their first apparition in the poem, WEIGHING DEATH BY PATRICIDE.

When, this spring, the virus shut us in,
the older boy and I
wore each other mean—
the friction of father and son heightened

by all around us the spidering sense
of sickness. I was glad the bitterness
between us went unseen
behind our house’s heavy, paneled door.

As the poem continues, the setting unfolds that he is walking with both sons. The older, branching off the trail, finding a spear, and exploring acts of strength and aggregation.

Balancing, he spears
a sharp-pronged stick
into the tree’s decomposition,
each jab kicking up
a spray of softened wood.

The poem expresses vulnerable fatherly concerns with the behaviors and actions of his boys. It explores how the external world, disease, as well as his own limitations and traumas are showing through in them.

The younger boy stays closer

to the trail and me, content
to peel away thick swaths

of diamond-furrowed bark.
He beams in triumph as he holds up

larger and larger strips, trophies
for me to see. Should I be disturbed
by their destruction? Their joy in it? Their zeal?
These last few weeks they’ve been scaring me.

In this collection, Pollock asks the hard questions of what it means to construct identity in the chaos of our times—to be the conductor of a constantly shifting symphony of identifying musics. He ponders what it means to be a man of mixed race, a father, and a teacher and asks where does one set roots, sink into the world, and take a stand on racism, sexism, violence, and injustice. One of his methods is through storytelling—recounting the narrative of his journey, his experiences, and lessons he has learned.

In the poem IS YOU IS, OR IS YOU AIN’T, he takes the reader through a cacophony of the multitude of past conversations orbiting around the same spectacle intent of his assured, and curious to others, racial identity.  What are you, is the opening line of a conversation he has been cursed to live, and may be eternally cursed to relive again and again. And he responds, I’m willing to wager, however, that you’re asking option two: the racial question. He goes on to narrate how narrow the confines of an American construction [point of view] that carries the racial residue– the questioner must have to ask in such a way, with such intent. And he responds…

What am I? I am a whole that is equal and
unequal to the sum of his parts. A liquid in a solid
system. The undetected spectrum floating between
fixed poles of a binary. I’m something while not being
anything that humans, especially American humans, can
figure out.

He closes this with a poignant final five words.

Did I answer your question?

This collection of poems is a generous embodiment, like a tribal elder narrative, an evocation and invitation. Through the examples of family we experience in his poems, we are invited to consider our place in the community—invited to listen, learn, observe, and to hope society moves toward acceptance, equality, value, and integrity in our country’s own evolving identity.

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Iain Haley Pollock is the author of the poetry collections Ghost, Like a Place (2018) and Spit Back a Boy (2011).  His poems have appeared in numerous other publications, ranging from American Poetry Review to The New York Times Magazine and The Progressive.  Pollock has received several honors for his work including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Faye di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award.  He currently serves as Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY.

ALL THE POSSIBLE BODIES is available from Alice James Books.

You like me because I’m a scoundrel. There aren’t enough scoundrels in your life.

-Han Solo (The Empire Strikes Back)

There was something so pleasant about that place
Even your emotions have an echo in so much space.

-Gnarels Barkley (Crazy)

Navigating Leigh Sugar’s collection, FREELAND, is like being caught in an argument between Han Solo and Gnarles Barkley on how to rescue the Rebel Princess from the Galactic Empire’s prison, The Death Star. At least they weren’t caught in the 1900s, still naming prisons via historical indigenous geographic locations. Because we are, and Leigh is, and that is where we find ourselves, with her, in this collection.

Freeland, Michigan, is home to the Saginaw Correctional Facility,
a Michigan state prison.

[Established in 1993, the facility’s naming aligns with common practices of identifying institutions by their geographic locations, thereby reflecting the area’s indigenous heritage and historical significance]

Now let’s jump galactic timelines, governments, and rebellions, and lovers back to 2025 when, instead of a senator and a scoundrel, we find a writer and a prisoner. Welcome to Freeland.

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. It’s an impressive undertaking, but she doesn’t go it alone. She has surrounded herself with a rebel squadron: Edmond Jabes, Phillip Johnson, Solmaz Sharif, Gnarels Barkley, and Natasha Trethewey – just to name a few. You are not alone! You have powerful rogue allies to guide you through the trenches of exile, art, mysticism, and memory – For The Republic!

Collection Opening

What evokes a deep respect for Leigh and her work is her relentless commitment to the truth of her physical and psychological experience in the prison system. She does not give readers a free pass straight to the heart of her detainment center – her collection. That was never offered to her when she would visit her partner. For her to gain access, the process was lonely, vast, and invasive. There are Visiting Standards and protocols:

An officer searches your body like an envelope
Before we meet again in the room of infinite goodbyes

1. Prior Authorization
-Submit a formal request.
-Provide your credentials, purpose, & connection to the inmate
-If approved, you’ll receive written confirmation with the date, time, and duration of the visit.

2. Pre-Visit Preparation
-Review the prison’s visitor rules (e.g., dress code, contraband policy).
-Bring valid government-issued ID and, if required, your press or legal credentials.
-Arrive early to allow time for processing.

3. Entry Process
-Check in at the front desk/lobby.
-Present your ID and approval documents.
-Store personal belongings in a designated locker (phones, wallets, and bags are usually not allowed.)
-Pass through metal detectors and a pat-down or wand search.
-Your materials (notebook, recording device, etc.) must be pre-approved.
-Sign a logbook and possibly receive a visitor badge.

4. Escort to Visitation Room
-A corrections officer will escort you through several secured gates or corridors.
-Inmates may be brought separately and may be in restraints until seated.

5. The Visit
-Usually held in a non-contact room (behind glass) or a supervised contact room.
-Monitored by staff or recorded in some cases.
-Interviews have a time limit (commonly 30–60 minutes).

6. Exit Procedure
-Return badge (if issued).
-Collect belongings.
-Sign out.
-Exit through security.

All right, Cid, this is supposed to be a Poetry book review. How is your editor going to feel about listing the prison’s visitor entry process when you haven’t even touched on theme, style, or anything poetic? Didn’t you get in trouble for this the last time you submitted a review on Sugar’s work?

Yes I did! But here is why, and it’s [enter curse words here] Genius!  Leigh is a poetry collection Architectural Jedi! Displayed above are the basic steps to visit a prisoner. At the heart of Freeland is the answer to freedom, yours and hers. But Leigh knows the best way to learn and value what is learnt is to experience it as she did. The physical and psychological requirements needed to gain entry to the heart of a prison, to release the prisoner held within. That experience and that journey are the key to freedom, and she is offering you that key. But you just have to go through the 17-step process to get there!

That’s right before you even get to the first poem in her collection, you have to pass through a 17-page entry process. She is the warden in Freeland, and you will follow her rules.

Here is the initial architecture of her poetry collection:

1. Prior Authorization

-Book Cover (image & title) 1
-Title Page (text only) 2
-Blank Page 3
-Second Title Page (title & image) 4

2. Pre-Visit Preparation
-Publishing Information Page 5
-Table of Contents Page (3 Pages) 6-8
-Blank Page 9
-Informational Quote (from the author) 10

3. Entry Process
-Blank Page 11
-Opening Quote to the Collection (Edmond Jabes) 12
-Blank Page 13

4. Escort to Visitation Room
-Opening Poem to the Collection (Architecture School) 14
-Blank Page 15
-Part 1 Title Page/Quote (Solmaz Sharif) 16

5. The Visit
-Blank Page 17
-First Poem (Inheritance)         Page 18!!!!!

Prior Authorization & Pre-Visit Preparation

As part of the pre-visit preparation, Leigh gives us two quotes and the poem Architecture School.

The blank page is not a grid we must adapt to. It will surely become so, but at what price?

-Edmond Jabes

There is nothing that has nothing to do with this.

-Solamz Sharif

Jabes was a Jewish man who was exiled from Egypt due to the Suez Crisis set by the Egyptian President in 1956. Solmaz Sharif is an Iranian poet who used United States Department of Defense Terminology to interrogate the language of war. Why these quotes? Why do they matter? What do they mean?

Alright Rebel Scum, let’s get poetical! Jabes and Sharif both reflect three of Leigh’s thematic threads within the walls of FREELAND: Exile, The Questioning of Form in Art and Society, and Mysticism / Connection. Which leads to her introductory poem: Architecture School.

In this poem, she reflects on the idea of white space, a space that must be added to, subtracted from, or altered in some capacity to create an entity, a structure, or art. 

We studied Philip Johnson’s Glass House, 
the perennial favorite. Seamless integration into the landscape.

She reflects on her desire for the things we create to add to or modify the landscape, as opposed to desecrating or defiling it. Prisons are designed to secure, surveil, and deter. They are designed to separate both the eyes of its inside world, as well as the eyes of the outside world, from the truths of each other, and the agendas behind that intentionality. With each close read of this collection, your eyes will strengthen as you will see a bit deeper into the prisons you have built for yourself, or have been forced into. The poem closes with this:

What wonder—to see the thing, and through it.

This is her call to use this collection, upon its completion, not as a stopping point, but as a launching – to see deeper into how and where we have found ourselves, and our partner, imprisoned.

Entry Process

Part one of the collection is separated into three sections. The first is a set of poems that ping-pong back and forth between the wars and prisons of her Inheritance, her past, as well as the prison of her present, which holds her and her partner hostage. The last poem of the first section, titled Security, walks you through the conveyor of mechanisms, machines, doors, searches, and body offerings she had to endure to see him. Security is what led me to the architecture of my opening for this review.

OPEN GATE ONE step in
put your keys and your ID on the table walk through
the machine whoops
take your belt off try again
it smells in there by the way OK GATE TWO

Section 2 is intimate and private, an internal dialogue: sometimes to herself, and sometimes to another. She knows all too well that the prisoners, her partner, are not allowed the privilege of intimacy and privacy. So she sacrifices hers to us, the readers, to understand a bit deeper what the outlying and unspoken realms of the prison system feel like to enter. 

I pretend I am an anthro-
pologist when I lift my

hair and tongue to show
I hide no drugs or weapons
behind my ears or in my
mouth.

Section 3 is probably my favorite. How in all this, they, Leigh and her prisoner, fight to try and keep each other and their relationship above water, to try and keep the passion of their love alive. At times, it can be the darkness of desperation that invokes in us our ability for ultimate creative measures. Measures of a rebel and a scoundrel. Measure for Fantasy and phone sex!  There are a lot of great pieces in this section, but at its center, you will find the Correction’s Vault. A jeweled crown of sonnets. 

This braided selection is her heart’s war being pushed to its precipice. Can love survive a prison sentence? Should it be expected to? What is this world that one has to look to the pioneers of poetry to answer these questions? Whose world? Her world, their world, our world. In the end, it is only she– and only she must decide. This shattering 16 sonnets, this call // this struggle // this fighting to escape a reckoning is compulsively concussive to read. 

Once you unlock the first, you are its prisoner until the end. And once there, we’ll see how free you feel, probably as free as they do. Probably as free as she does. Each following sonnet is pinned to a line or passionate phrase from the previous, until they entropically implode upon themselves. 

In the visiting room I try to reconcile the you
I love with the jumpsuited you beside me.
I confess I want to leave and leave you there.

So far this review only covers the opening and part one of the collection! There are two more major parts, and the corridors, cells, escape routes, and medical centers you coaster through will leave you wet and sweating and in need of… 

a white V-neck T-shirt—619754
printed along its body-side bottom hem—
wrapped in a clear plastic garbage bag
an officer hands me to put in the coin-operated locker
before moving through security to see you

You will be sweating and aching because [A Number Is Just A Name]. 

This is where I will make my final stand, with two personal intersections with this work. Both from deep in my heart as a New Orleans poet and high school educator of 20 years:

The first is because of the School-to-Prison Pipeline. The school-to-prison pipeline in New Orleans refers to the pattern of pushing students, especially those from marginalized communities, out of the public school system and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. This phenomenon is characterized by harsh disciplinary practices, lack of resources, and inadequate support systems that disproportionately affect students of color and students with disabilities.

The second is because in the third semester of my MFA, my mentor, Kate Gale, assigned me One Big Self by C. D. Wright. (Ms. Sugar was a finalist for the C.D. Wright Poetry Prize in 2024.) C.D. Wright wrote One Big Self, a documentary-poetry project to humanize the incarcerated men and women living through the prison system in Louisiana. In it, she reminds us that they are more than their prisoner identities. 

We are all more than our prisons. If you read Freeland, you will hurt a little, heal a little, and hope a lot.

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Leigh (she/her) is a writer, teacher, and, most importantly, learner. According to her cardiologist, she is “an extremely pleasant but most unfortunate 34-y/o.” She created and edited That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Settings (New Village Press, 2023). Her work appears in POETRY, jubilat, Split this Rock, and more. She teaches poetry workshops through various organizations, including Poetry Foundation, Hugo House, and prisons in Michigan. She also works for Rachel Zucker’s poetry podcast, “Commonplace.”

You can follow her on Instagram @lekasugar

Freeland is available from Alice James Books.

“God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions.
Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back.“

-Gloria Steinem

“Myths which are believed in, tend to become true.”                                                 

-George Orwell

Navigating the poems in Jamie Smith’s collection, The Flightless Years, is akin to experiencing MTV’s The Real World – Greek Mythos Season.

What happens when you put Chronos, Apollo, Artemis, Persephone, Alice, J, the speaker, and her mother in the same room? Apollo’s sun chariot is stolen and turned into a green 97 Geo Tracker. Children are consumed by their parents, only to be explosively reborn. Ambrosian-stardust addiction leads to tragedy and allies turn into enemies. It is an incredibly well-constructed catastrophe. When we deem those around us godlike, be they family or friends, darker realities are revealed.

The myths predate forgiveness. Lighting, fire, wrath, and flood—the early Gods were invested in violence. I don’t know when this changed, when we came to believe in supreme benevolence. In the time before forgiveness, there was only revenge or rescue.

The Opening

Let us dive into a journey of shifting galaxies – divine comedies and tragedies, realities and fictions, family and fatality, romance and wreckage. 

Before she forces her readers to these depths, Smith benevolently opens up this collection by way of a very seductive piece titled Stingray. This poem is a siren’s lure to the pleasure and pain that the reader will witness. Before the final line, which disrobes the speaker to her lover, there are shared bodies of exploration – scars, birthmarks, knees, tongues, clavicles, and thighs.

Smith is the Hephaestus of poem endings, and many of her poems close with the finest metallurgy or lava-like drippings of lines. The final line in Stingray…

Enough words for tonight. 

Section I

In the first section, we meet the three primary women that readers will follow throughout the collection: The speaker, the speaker’s lover Alice, and the speaker’s mother, who is continuously transmorphing her character between Artemis, Persephone, Chronos, and many others. Many poems in the first section are snaring serpents lying in wait to strike. The Flightless Years is a constellation, both in format and phrases, that introduces the stage of mythology, exploring a mother and daughter’s relationship.

Rat Nest is an origin story of how the lowest of creatures, suffering the hells of this world, also possess an immortal instinct to survive. When We Were Young I Never Lost Or Won introduces the adolescent curiosities to tempt death and daring, pitting the mind and body against freeways and freight trains. In The Closet brings us back to the opening poem, Stingray perhaps, introducing us to the narrator’s Alice. But what is very special is the reader’s introduction to the first three of nine, Flawed Mythologies.

These are a series of lyrical essays of the speaker’s desire, or curse, to recall the relationships with the loved ones from her life. In FMI the speaker is forced to return to and recycle the myths – as she comes to terms with the falling of her once godlike friend, J. FMII, a goddess mother training her daughter to survive the battles in the desolate lands of this world–This was the game: she would say, “Hit me,” and I would refuse. And FMIII–

I remember her holding me under water until I inhaled silt. Then she saved me. Which fact matters more? She was just playing.

Section II & III

After mentors, thresholds, tests/enemies/allies, there is the internal battle of the self–the innermost cave.  The poem, In Praise of Variance, captures this in these lines:

My mother taught me
there’s a certain grace in giving up
on the hope of relief.

In the same section, the poem, Leap Years, situates the reader with the speaker in Brooklyn. This poem captivated me immediately with the vivid description of the Domino Sugar Refinery. It hits close to home for me because we have a sister Domino factory here in New Orleans. I have also witnessed in solace, and sorrow, the hazy neon lights smoking into the sunset from the west bank of the Mississippi River.

the Domino sugar factory sign,
its dead neon

glowing alive.
The dome of the sky becomes

clear to us—a half-sphere
lit at its edges, a cat’s-claw-moon

In this section, FMIV and FMV, a god falls to darkness, and so does a piece of the heart of the narrator, who had always been a faithful believer. She must fight through herself and her experience with her mother, as her friend J with his father, to perhaps die, be reborn, and return home with the elixir to survive.

I am my mother’s daughter. J was his father’s son. Some violences transmit
from generation to generation. But our actions were our own.

Section III closes with FMVI, a tale of humans’ desire for the ambrosia of the gods. When they attempt to create it on their own, it is tainted with ambition and escapism.

Years ago, a batch of heroin called Raptor led to a dozen overdose deaths in New York and New Jersey. It was cut with Ajax. Before Raptor there was Icarus. The tiny bag had a red wing stamped on its side.

In drug-speak, when someone injects for the first time, they say they’ve gotten their wings. This is the story of Pegasus, the white horse the heroes rode to freedom.

Red Bull says its wings will make you fly. Heroin turned Raptor cut with Ajax–says it will make you die…

Section IV

I will leave the final section for each to venture through on their own and close on this: The Flightless Years is a modern day lyrical epic and fantasy on the war of love – for ourselves, our friends, our family, and our gods.

Smith, for me, becomes Hermes as the writer of this collection. Like Hermes, she is the harbinger between boundaries and transitions. She writes many roads, thresholds, borders, and all forms of crossings between worlds – both literal and mythical. She guides readers through her personal journey, allowing them to relate with their own experiences, find their own elixirs of survival, and bring them home.

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Jamie L. Smith holds an MFA from Hunter College (2020) and a PhD in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Utah (2024). Her poems, nonfiction, and hybrid works appear in publications including Bellevue Literary Review, Red Noise Collective, Southern Humanities Review, Tusculum Review, The Write Launch, Red Wheelbarrow, and elsewhere. She lives and writes between Salt Lake and New York City and is an Assistant Professor of English at Utah Asia Campus in Songdo, South Korea.

The Flightless Years is available from Finishing Line Press.

Hyeseung Song’s intimate and tender memoir, Docile: Memoirs of a Not-so-Perfect Asian Girl, explores the captivity of the expectations introduced by the “American Dream,” a concept that promises prosperity and happiness to anyone who works hard. For Song and her family, these expectations are amplified through the model minority myth that Asian Americans often face. This myth stereotypes Asian American adults as higher-earning and Asian American children as excellent students, especially in science and math. Song grows up alongside both and in this memoir she challenges these narrowly defined ideas as she carefully chronicles the complexities of her journey. It is a path of self-discovery and reflection and one where Song must re-define who she is and what happiness means to her. er. 

The daughter of Korean immigrants, Song’s childhood is consumed by competing ideas of the “American Dream” and what success looks like. Her father, who she calls Appa, makes the decision to move the family to America in pursuit of his idea of the American Dream– large sums of money. As Song describes, “Appa wanted it all.” However, his elaborate business ventures and impulsive spending drained the family’s bank accounts. 

In the face of Appa’s recklessness, Song’s mother, who she calls Umma, provides for the family as a nurse. Observing Umma’s quiet compliance in funding Appa’s fruitless endeavors, Song internalizes the lesson that “love is obedience.”  In turn, she attempts to be docile and fulfill Umma’s wishes. This mother-daughter relationship fuels the central conflict of the memoir. Umma, deeply unhappy with her own life warns Song, “don’t be like me when you grow up Hyeseung-a.” However, in Umma’s efforts to mold Song into her idea of “success,” Song becomes confined to an idea of the American Dream that prioritizes achievement over happiness.

As Song grows older, her identity becomes increasingly entangled with her mother’s expectations. Song learns that her mother’s love for her is conditional on her success, reflecting, “she loved me, but it never felt what I wanted was worth listening to because she was too busy trying to shape me in her image, to love me if and only if and on condition.” 

While away at Princeton, Song reaches a breaking point. Despite being the only girl in her school to attend an Ivy League university, often regarded as the pinnacle of success in American society, the pressures to succeed toss Song into a depression. She confides in her dean and says, “I’d like to belong to myself and work at something I know I could contribute to without having to ‘be the best.’ A mistake wouldn’t be death, but rather a mistake. At night, I’d read or walk. And the only rule would be to do what fulfills me and only me.” In response, the dean offers Song an escape, a year off from Princeton. This conversation marks the rejection of the traditional American Dream as well as the expectations of her family and the pursuit of an alternative path. For the first time, Song gains agency over her own life. 

Many coming-of-age stories focus on the universal human desire to fit in; however, Song’s story highlights the Asian American experience often left out of the media. As a child, Song is introduced to the pressures of the model minority myth through expectations from her peers, parents, and teachers to excel in school. Her identity is so tightly bound to her academic success that when she is given the superlative, “thinks she’s the smartest” instead of “smartest girl” it destroys her sense of self completely. For most of her early education, Song not only believes that succeeding academically is what she should be doing but also who she is. Stories of Song’s academic success and failures begin in just the second chapter and dominate much of the memoir, highlighting their significance on her identity. 

With lyrical vulnerability and a perspective usually left out of mainstream literature, Docile: Memoirs of a Not-so-Perfect Asian Girl serves as a critique of the American Dream and a powerful reminder that success can look different for everyone. In a time of increasing mental health issues for young adults, Song’s memoir is both comforting and encouraging for those who feel lost amongst the various influences in their lives as they attempt to discover their identity.

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“Docile: Memoirs of a Not-so-Perfect Asian Girl“ is available now, from Simon and Schuster, Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Books-A-Million.

About the reviewer:

“In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

-Martin Luther King
Letters From Birmingham Jail

To read Leigh Sugar’s collection of writing, in That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It, is like visiting a prison, looking through the bars, and seeing – perhaps a villainized version of yourself. How is it that when you stop and stare at the person behind bars that you both know and don’t know them? You love them, and are scared of them; You want to save them, help them, or at least listen to them. And in the end decide that the best and most empathetic thing to do is to offer connections and resources with which they can develop their voice and share it by way of publication, with hope that it will lead to positive change in the “justice system.”

This is a collection of writing by artists who have taught creative arts to people who are incarcerated or otherwise involved in the criminal legal system. Contributions were selected from submissions responding to a national call, as well as from targeted outreach to specific individuals involved in the prison arts community. I accepted poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. This project is unique in its poly-vocality: it gathers accounts from artists from across the country (and one international submission) working across different mediums, demonstrating the range of experiences one can have when entering these institutions.

Justice System…what a strange and sad term. One of the first thoughts in my head was how would someone go about trying to design and manifest such a potentially treacherous literary task – given the current state of the relationship between citizens and law enforcement. And even if you were able to – how would you manage to gather allies and not offend both the people whose voices you are trying to help broadcast – as well as those who fund, lead, staff, and work to keep them contained? In an interview with New York University she was asked, and addressed those thoughts and struggles openly and honestly:

I was nervous about how and where to position this writing
given that I didn’t want to speak for incarcerated artists or
co-opt the conversation. So, I realized I couldn’t be alone in
these thoughts and started reaching out to others. I soon had enough material to envision a larger collection, and the project has grown over the years through my own professional development to take on a decidedly more political stance.

As an educator in New Orleans, I know that the school-to-prison pipeline is an issue that has been “officially” pushed toward public awareness since 2005. I have deep respect for Sugar’s drive and persistence to push this collection into the present world. How do you best build opportunity, without the reflex to save? It is good that some have helped pave the path for such an undertaking.. Two years ago my MFA mentor Kate Gale, Publisher of Red Hen Press, assigned me to read and digest C. D. Wright’s One Big Self, where she laid witness to hard times in Louisiana Prisons.

Not to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to
aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain. Not to
demonize, not anathematize. What I wanted was to
unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time.

-C.D. Wright

Sugar immediately begins to tackle, and address, the difficulty of the lexicon used when discussing the prison setting: The landscape of “hard time” is commonly represented through data. How most information is hidden from the greater population at large, and that which isn’t is geared for the receivers to see inmates/prisoners as dehumanized others. There are nearly two million people jailed in the United States, and this a greatly reduced number in the aftermath of covid. When taking into consideration parole, probation, and other alternative avenues– the real numeric data is closer to six million. The real truth is that the US incarcerates more of its people per capita than any other country in the world.

When asked the why, the reason, and the purpose for this collection–Sugar spoke on the literary community truth that should bother us all, and push us to engage in the power of poly-vocality for change: privilege and accessibility in the arts for marginalized communities.

This book is for non-incarcerated students learning about arts in prison, practitioners looking to share their skills and knowledge with incarcerated students, people concerned with questions surrounding access and privilege in the arts, incarcerated artists interested in the experience of those who enter the facilities to teach, and anybody curious to encounter the prison industrial complex from a human/creative, rather than policy/statistical, perspective.

The collection is divided into three sections: Prose, Hybrid, and Poetry. Let’s walk the prison halls and walls in this collection together, as I offer an observation of what you will encounter should you choose to fully complete the journey on your own.

Prose and Con(s)victs: To Indite or Indict, that is the question.

The prose section opens with Phil Christman’s piece, On Diction and Disprivilege: How an obscure verb changed the ways I edit prisoner’s writing. Christman is an editor for The Sky is On Fire After All: The Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing Volume Six. He was editing Benjamin Cloud’s poem Prison Letters, which you can find on page 172 of Sugar’s collection, specifically the line: Pen meets paper the correspondence indited.

Indited is a transitive verb from the Old French endtier which means to put into words, to compose, or to put into writing. Cloud was right, and Christman found himself wrong. I encourage you to read this piece as he walks you through his inner turmoil of battling himself, his copyeditor/wife, and his typesetter/printer in order to remain true to the writer.

Our society’s collective unwillingness to imagine that such people (intelligent and well-spoken inmates) exist creates an atmosphere in which, even if I believe Benjamin Cloud meant to write “indite,” I’m still tempted to foist an unnecessary and absurd edit on the poem, simply because I don’t think some of his readers will be able to read the word without assuming it’s an error, one ultimately attributable to him, a man in prison, a black man – a man who hardly needs more strangers attributing errors to him. I find myself tempted to butcher his copy for his own protection! Ultimately, of course, I didn’t do so. I didn’t do so because it would be a horrible violation of my role as editor and his role as writer.

Those with privilege often have the instinct to save, correct, or override the action – and in this case the words of those without privilege. Sugar wrestled with this, as did Christman here, as do many others in this collection, and as do I. This collection of growth-oriented people, like those just mentioned, sharing their experiences and actions in contending with this marginalized group of our writing community, should push us to check ourselves to do the same – and to take action on it.

Hybridization Breakouts Come in Threes

Deep in the Hybrid Section of the collection, there is an interview of incarcerated writers selection titled: On Why “Prison Writer” is a Limited Label: What Incarcerated Writers Want the Literary Community to Understand. The stigma the prison writing community finds itself being constantly vetted by is as follows…

On the flip side, nearly every serious writer in prison I’ve encountered grows a similar disdain for, or at least frustration with, the label prison writer – one that slaps on a special qualifier of romanced danger and warped intrigue, invites immediate background checks, sets up expectations of particular content, and potentially turns off an entire readership.

Incarcerated writer Elizabeth Hayes agrees stating:

Every time a prisoner submits their writing into the public sphere they are subjecting themselves to an audience who can easily look them up and be told a prosecutor’s version of a story (true or untrue) about their conviction. This is in juxtaposition to all a prisoner desires: To put the past behind them; To lay low and quietly merge back into society; To reconnect with those they love in fresh circumstances. . . . While all artists/writers question the value of their work and wonder who is viewing it and how it is being perceived, a prisoner who is an artist or who writes always carries the added burden of having to apologize for their past.

In the early 2020s Pen America launched The Breakout Movement: Works of Justice.

This was to become an online series featuring writers and writing connected to the Pen America Prison and Justice Writing Program. The partnership aimed to dig into the relationship between writing and incarceration, and presented challenging conversations about criminal justice in the United States.

In the piece three questions are asked of the incarcerated writers:

1. What do you want us to know about the experience of being a writer in prison? Or being a writer outside of prison (the label, the stigma, the space)? Or both!
2. What are your hopes for how your work is received by the literary community on the outside?
3. In what ways can you envision a lasting connection with the literary community outside the walls? From your perspective, what can we do to be more inclusive, or to help shift the narrative?

Here is one response to the first question by Zeke Caligiuri:

The story of incarceration is not a singular one. Just as the story of marginalization or the dynamics of power do not follow a singular linear moral pathway throughout our history. That is why it is important to broaden the spectrum of voices being held in the great captivity business. Whether free or encaged, we all live with some kind of stigma – that’s the nature of making decisions you can’t take back. We have to temper our own regret with our belief that our work matters at some deeply philosophical or social level, that cannot be represented by anybody else. So, as writers, we are conscientious that a sense of self-value can only be created personally. If we are looking to be redeemed at some greater social level with our work, I’d say that is an undue expectation for our art. We only get short windows of time on this earth to be and create, wasting it because we want other people to love or like, or forgive us is a lot of pressure to put on our art.

Prison Poetry Blues

“On Blueness” by Joshua Bennett appears in the poetry section of the collection. Here is the opening section of the piece.

On Blueness

which is neither misery
nor melancholy per se,
but the way anything buried
aspires. How blackness becomes
a bladed pendulum swaying between
am I not a man & a brother
& meat. How it dips
into the position
of the unthought,
then out. Trust me.
Foucault isn’t
helpful here. I am after
what comes when the law leaves
a dream gutted. The space
between a plea & please.

Bennet has become one of the most powerful emerging voices in contemporary poetry. The Sobbing School, his opening debut in 2014 and winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series Award was born out of state violence against black lives. This piece and many others in this collection force the question: What comes when the law leaves a dream gutted?

This collection is a brave and bold task of shining a light on the prison system in this country, the voices contained therein, and the allies to those voices who would broadcast the idea that their lives and voices hold value and should be heard. This is no minor or easy scripted task. Sugar, her collected writers, and their collected voices however are strong steps in the direction of placing these truths on the pens and papers of us all.

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Leigh (she/her) is a writer, teacher, and, most importantly, learner. Her debut poetry collection, FREELAND, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2025, and she created and edited That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and poetry by artists teaching in carceral settings (New Village Press, 2023). Her work appears in POETRY, jubilat, Split this Rock, and more. She teaches poetry workshops through various organizations including Poetry Foundation, Tupelo Press, Justice Arts Coalition, etc. She co-facilitates (with Nila Narain) Access Oriented Lit, a reading series by and for disabled poets. She also works for Commonplace, Rachel Zucker’s poetry podcast.

That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It is available from NYU Press.