Leigh Sugar’s debut poetry collection, FREELAND, expresses “an impossible love story" in which the poet is in love with an incarcerated man and grapples with the heartache of orbiting the prison while he remains inside. The poetic sequence “CORRECTIONS” considers that “Alone, we silent ask if love is leaving a part / of oneself with your love whenever you’re apart.

The separation within this relationship and the ways incarceration disrupts lives suffuse these poems. The collection captures a reality in which the poet yearns for things to be different. The poet writes, “I want your body to be only my body / and not state property to be held and taxed” in “CORRECTIONS.”

The poem “Fantasy” illustrates the depth to which prison sits in contrast to outside life with dreams, such as “Cells are only what keep bodies and plants alive.” Another desire is that “Solitary confinement is when / you choose to enter a room filled with sunlight. No one puts you there but you. / No one keeps you there.” The poet assimilates the circumstances of prison to the extent that, upon going to the subway and “remembering I am not going to prison / today,” the speaker realizes that “today I can carry anything” rather than worrying about security. FREELAND shows how far the walls of the prison reach.

Sugar is a writer, editor, and educator who lives in Ann Arbor. She will celebrate the release of FREELAND at Literati Bookstore with Tamar Ashdot on Wednesday, June 25, at 6:30 pm.

Before her event, I talked with Sugar about her journey with poetry, poetic and political structures, specific poems in FREELAND, and her work with a poetry podcast.

Q: FREELAND is your debut collection. When you were at the University of Michigan, you won a Hopwood Award. Tell us how you started writing poetry and then this book.
A: I’ve long identified as a writer—always enjoying English classes in school, journaling, and writing little stories as a child, but actually felt like the literary dud of my family—please read this with a smile, this is no trauma! I was very lucky to be raised in a home that adored books and literature; books lined every wall of our home. My parents and sister are voracious readers, so it was normalized, coming up, to center writing and books in a life.

That said, I didn’t major in English in college. My path is very diverse—unsettled, perhaps. I initially started college in California as a pre-med major, then left to take some time off before returning to Michigan to study architecture. I ended up leaving architecture as well, ultimately finishing with a degree in general studies, having taken only a handful of English—let alone poetry—classes. One of the last classes I took, “The Art of the Essay,” birthed the manuscript that won a Hopwood Award, but this award was for nonfiction prose, not poetry.

While at Michigan, I volunteered with the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), facilitating writing workshops in prisons. It was my work with PCAP that encouraged me to seek a deeper background in poetry, as I wanted to be a better resource to the incarcerated writers who were seeking guidance with their work. After college, I trained and worked as a professional dancer in Seattle—I told you I was indecisive!—but expanded my poetic endeavors through independent reading and enrolling in community poetry classes and workshops. I applied to MFA programs in poetry because I felt I hit a wall in terms of my self-led education, and wanted more structure and guidance so I could bring this education back to the incarcerated writers.

Once at NYU, my goals and intentions shifted. While I still felt drawn to seeking education to improve my facilitation skills, I also became obsessed with craft and began allowing myself to imagine my own path as a poet. I wrote the poems in FREELAND across the span of a decade—some of the earliest pieces were written even before I attended NYU. After graduate school, I stepped away from the manuscript and even went back to school for a second master’s in public administration, before giving in to the call of the book and returning to the very draft-y collection two years later.

I could never have predicted this journey from enthusiastic reader to published poet. I don’t think one can plan these things, though I am extremely lucky to have been exposed to so many mentors and peers across many fields along the way, all of whom have influenced where I am now.

Q: Your new book begins by noting, “Freeland, Michigan is home to the Saginaw Correctional Facility, a Michigan State Prison.” What does it mean to title a book after a place?
A: I’m not sure what it means to title a book after a place! I titled this book FREELAND because the irony of the subject—prison—versus the literal name of the town in which many of the poems unfold was too obvious to ignore. I don’t think it’s a clever title; it’s really the only title that felt appropriate.

Notably, one of the main drags near Freeland is Tittabawassee Road—clearly a gesture to, or relic of, the Indigenous peoples of the area. An in-depth investigation into the history of the native populations and their colonized lands lies beyond the scope of FREELAND, but this past certainly haunts me—haunted me every time I drove to the prison—and haunts each poem in the collection.

I also find it fascinating how not focused on the land/the natural environment FREELAND is. This ignorance makes sense, given the severe interiority and institutional reality of the poems, but it stands in such stark—and I find, devastating—contrast to the land’s rich history.

Q: FREELAND is described as containing poems “that both embody and resist formal structures.” How do these poems achieve both of those structural approaches?
A: Form is central to FREELAND for a number of reasons. I am most interested in poetry where content and form are deeply considered—where the narrative, or actual words in the poem, are palpably connected to how they appear on the page. Also, when we talk about “form” in poetry, we often conjure received structures such as the sonnet, the ode, or any other number of structures that provide “rules” or “guidelines” a writer must follow—or decide to not follow. This relationship to rules and restriction is integral to a consideration of the prison system, which is nothing if not a system of rules and restrictions. In this way, writing in—and against—form, was a way for me to both comply with and resist against received rules—something I always want to do in the setting of the prison, but often cannot, for fear of repercussion.

One place this is most evident is in the sonnet sequence “CORRECTIONS,” which appears near the middle of the book and is a sort of “turning point” in the speaker’s positionality toward the beloved. Each poem in the 16-poem sequence is a sonnet, meaning each has 14 lines, and each ending embraces a “turn,” or moment of rethinking, what had been stated earlier in the poem. I even tried to loosely maintain iambic pentameter throughout, à la Shakespeare. In a sonnet crown, the last line of one sonnet is repeated as the first line in the following, etc., until the final sonnet of the sequence, whose last line matches back to the first line of the first sonnet. In “CORRECTIONS,” the reader will find that I blurred this repetition; I “broke” the rules. Instead of true repetition, I made slight changes from the last line of the preceding poem to the first line of the next poem; I made, quite literally, corrections within the sequence. This marriage of form and content is most exciting to me, and a quality to which I always aspire in my work.

Q: This poetry collection not only resists poetic structures but also pushes against social, cultural, and political structures. Did the poetic commentary arise naturally as you wrote, or did you compose the poems with these structures in mind?
A: I find that poetry can more readily hold dialectics than other forms of writing, and I am, if nothing else, chronically indecisive and anxious. As such, any time a critical thought around social, cultural, and/or political structures arises, my mind immediately offers a seemingly contradictory idea. This means deciding on a single “thesis” or “point” to push is difficult, if not impossible! I think all poetry is inherently political, as it is a performance of what the poet and/or speaker finds urgent enough to lyricize. It turns out that the topics I obsess over, find urgent, are more overtly “political” than, say, a poem about a garden, which would still be political, in the sense of—who planted the garden? Who is speaking about it, and what is their relationship to it? What is the speaker’s relationship to tending land? Etc. Still, to repeat one of the epigraphs I quote in the collection: “Nothing/has nothing to do with this” by Solmaz Sharif perfectly captures how I feel about the storm of sometimes seemingly disparate—but actually entirely entangled—social, political, cultural, and aesthetic concerns of any particular moment in time.

Q: Let’s talk your poem “Upon Being Told I’m Untrustworthy.” In it, the words are backward, so they can only be read in a mirror. Why did you choose this form?
A: “Upon Being Told I’m Untrustworthy” is a complicated, complicating, confusing, confounding poem to encounter, and this is because in it, I’m confronting my own complicated, complicating, confusing, confounding questions about ethno-religion, statehood, genocide, the U.S. war machine, racism, Islamophobia. I do not here, or ever, intend to “trick” my readers, or deliberately mislead them, but I also never want to present a false sense of self-knowledge or understanding.

I was raised in a secular humanistic Jewish community, which basically means certain Jewish values, like tikkun olam—leaving the world better than you found it—and tzedakkah—giving back, but more akin to anonymous aid than charity—were highly emphasized, along with practicing the ritual of Jewish holidays. I cherish this value system, which I believe informs much of how I move through the world, but as I’ve come into adulthood, I’m more and more aware of the holes in my education—particularly regarding my lack of knowledge about the history of “Israel” and the Palestinian fight for liberation. These “knowledge gaps” are increasingly problematic, as Palestinian liberation is tied up in all I believe in—disability justice, abolition, the dissolution of Western imperialism—and yet I feel bereft of tools to usefully engage in the topic. I never learned Hebrew, but some folks assume that because I am Jewish, I inherently know Hebrew and have close connections to Israel, neither of which is true.

So, in trying to work through this tangle of not-knowing, assumed responsibility, and social duty, I opted to write the poem from right to left, which is how both Hebrew and Arabic—and other Aramaic languages—are written/read. Not only are the lines written from right to left, they are made further illegible by flipping the letters, so that it’s nearly impossible to read the bulk of the poem directly on the page unless held up to a mirror. The mirror technology seemed an apt way to mimic the way the poem insists on self-examination/reflection. It is meant to perform the way that I believe I am not a mere “bystander” in the Palestinian genocide.

The final two lines are set in a recognizable orientation because I felt called to merge the “unintelligible” with something more immediately comprehensible; to show how, regardless of the personal or political confusion I or others may feel, that the fight for liberation must include the liberation of all people, including ourselves and our own possibly limiting beliefs about what abolition and liberation mean.

Q: The penultimate poem is the “Ars Poetica” followed by “Revision,” which considers longing and how “The remnants of the fruit dissolve, no / fruit-shaped hole left in the soil.” In some ways, the resolution remains elusive because this longing remains, and so does the prison. What about these poems prompted you to place them at the end of the collection?
A: There is a well-known adage from Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God: “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” The same is true for poems—some poems ask questions, some answer them. I think all my poems ask questions, resist resolution. I’m not sure what resolution means, really, in terms of a poem. To me, it seems resolution would assume some degree of assuredness or decisiveness, which is not my area of expertise, especially when writing about such existential themes. Perhaps another piece of writing I endeavor may reach a more conclusive ending, but this book begins and ends in medias res—that is, in the middle of an ongoing story—the ongoing story being my life.

Additionally, it felt important to maintain a palpable restlessness or unease, even through FREELAND’s conclusion, because restlessness and unease are the honest sentiments of the entire book, and I don’t have a great imagination when it comes to speculating about such an unknown future.

Finally, I was advised—smartly—by a mentor to ultimately center the book on myself, rather than the incarcerated beloved. “Ars Poetica” and “Revision” are poems that, though they reference the relationship to the speaker’s beloved, more directly consider the very simple, and in many ways very common and relatable, conditions of an internal experience that contextualizes how and why the relationship unfolded in the first place. Loneliness and the quest for not-loneliness are near-universal experiences, and I would worry about them regardless of my apparent circumstances.

Q: Looking at the book as a whole, the notes for the book say, “The cube imagery that appears throughout is inspired by Jenn Givhan.” In what ways does the cube interact with the poems?
A: Jenn is an extremely talented and generous writer I consulted with early on in the construction of FREELAND, and along with her feedback, she sent me this little cube image, thinking (correctly) I might find it interesting. I’d known that I wanted my collection to have almost-blank pages; “non-poem” moments of pause and tension. The cube was a perfect display of how I think about form—a suggestion of a container, but not necessarily as binding, or pure, as one might assume (hence the small gaps at the corners). Jenn seemingly intuited this desire for a repeating symbol to use, and once I saw it, I quickly imagined ways that some writing fragments could interact with the symbol as a way of creating a through-line for FREELAND.

Tangentially, I got a tattoo of the image on my right arm, just above my elbow, when my agent successfully placed FREELAND with the publisher, Alice James Books. I was inspired by choreographer and former mentor Alice Gosti, who gets little tattoos of symbols representing each new work she creates.

Q: You work for Commonplace, Rachel Zucker’s poetry podcast. What does your role involve?
A: While Commonplace is on hiatus right now, my role primarily involves transcribing episodes, with some other ancillary pick-up-the-slack tasks. Commonplace has a truly outstanding catalog of episodes, and when I joined the team in 2023, they were seeking someone to catch up in their transcription collection and keep up with transcribing episodes moving forward, with the goals of improving both organizational memory and podcast accessibility. I highly recommend folks check out the podcast! Some people treat it almost like an alternative MFA, as Rachel interviews so many of the most prolific contemporary poets, who share plenty of ideas, prompts, and wisdom.

Q: What is on your nightstand to read?
A: My nightstand is a mess of books I intend to read, am currently reading, am re-reading, have already read. In no particular order: Radical Poetics by Khadijah Queen; Hardly Creatures by Rob Macaisa Colgate; Tree Surgeon by Alecia Beymer; perennial fashion presence falling by Fred Moten; It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies by Noam Chomsky; Appropriate by Paisley Rekdal; Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson; Gore Capitalism by Sayak Valencia; Happening by Annie Ernaux. I could go on. Things are not tidy over here!

Q: Now that this book is about to be published, what are your writing plans?     
A: That certainly is the question! I’ve been writing poems separate from FREELAND for years, as most of the poems in the collection were finished before 2022. I’m not sure if these poems will coalesce somewhere, or if they’ll remain one-offs in various magazines—some recent publications include “Semiotics” in Pleiades Magazine and “In Poetry School” in New Ohio Review. I also have a couple of essays forthcoming—one in The Adroit Journal, and one in The Rumpus.

I’m very interested in the technology of “the book” as a whole unit, so I imagine my next collection will be another centered around a specific issue or topic; at this point, a couple ideas include an investigation into “Stiff Person Spectrum Disorder,” a neurologic condition I experience, as well as a book concerning the history and practice of the U.S. death penalty, but I really don’t know what will emerge! In the meantime, I intend to continue writing poems, thematically connected or not, and hopefully gain more experience writing book reviews, as I love supporting the work of others in the poetry community, and book reviews are so critical in our efforts to draw in readers!

Finally, I’m fascinated by the field of book arts and have been dabbling in basic bookbinding techniques. Too many interests, never enough time—the best problem to have.

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.   

Leigh Sugar celebrates the release of "FREELAND" at Literati Bookstore with Tamar Ashdot on Wednesday, June 25, at 6:30 pm.