Leigh Sugar, Freeland

 

INHERITANCE

In 1920, my grandfather received an American name:
Zucker to Sugar, now my own last name. 

The Third Reich never tattooed on his forearm
a number. I count myself lucky to have a last name. 

Each April, magnolias litter my parents’ front yard
before Michigan’s spring blizzard exposes its silver face. 

My oldest friend’s surname is Blessing; I know to consider
possible prophecy when giving a name. 

At eight, we jarred petals with perfumes and spices
to capture that early spring teasing embrace. 

I didn’t, back then, know cinnamon from cedar—
those potions turned rancid on shelves, defined waste. 

These days I scrawl 619754
on envelopes after a locked-up beloved’s last name. 

He says, Leigh, I dream I’ve forgotten my number
and wake to realize I’ve forgotten my name.

Michigan “writer, editor, educator, dancer, and, more importantly, learner” Leigh Sugar’s full-length poetry debut is Freeland (New Gloucester ME: Alice James Books, 2025), a collection that opens with the information that “Freeland, Michigan is home to the Saginaw Correctional Facility, a Michigan state prison.” Framed as “an impossible love story,” Freeland “examines the unbreakable bond between the author and an incarcerated writer.” As the press release continues: “Drawing critical connections between personal and family history, the Jewish diaspora, and the racial imaginary of whiteness, Leigh Sugar obsessively searches form and language to communicate what happens in the U.S. mass incarceration system. 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.”

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, writing on loss, love, grief and language, wrapping in threads of family story, poetics and how best one might articulate across such potentially vast distances. As she writes as part of the extended sequence “FREELAND: AN ERASURE”: “Not even Eliot or Pound approach the melancholy weapon oof the punitive form. // In profile, I separate from this justice. // Tattoo economy pens my skin into a letter. // Dear anyone.” Freeland exists as an interesting counterpoint to other contemporary literary titles that have explored the prison system, whether Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng writing her father through the poetry collection Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen’s This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison, and Other Complications (HarperCollins, 2017), or the collaborative study between photographer Deborah Luster and the late American poet C.D. Wright, One Big Self: an investigation (Lost Roads, 2003; Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007) [see my review of such here]. Sugar centres her specifics around the abstract of human space and interaction, connection and disconnection, composing a lyric of deeply-crafted lines that braid lived experience, whether by the narrator or her “beloved,” across a poetics around human connection, even and especially amid such punitive disruption. “A smile,” she writes, to open the poem “REPRESSION,” “when the officer commands I stop // touching you. The space between shame // and pleasure shorter than the scythe- // shaped stretch of shoulder // revealed when my shirtsleeve slips off // the me whose swift hands leave your neck to right the slip // then return to my own lap. I sag, // guilty, still, still under the camera.”

ARS POETICA
after Hermes, tr. from Arabic by Maged Zaher
 

I want a poetry
that reassembles the body 

that is 

investigates love
how it is not enough 

that is 

what prison taught me
teaches me 

that is 

I want to not be lonely