BOOKS FROM LEIGH SUGAR
ID: Book with bright orange background and a white dandelion with green stem in the foreground. The title reads “THAT’S A PRETTY THING TO CALL IT.” The very bottom of the book cover is white with orange letters reading: “Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions. Leigh Sugar, Editor”
AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE
New Village Press, 2023 | for batch orders/desk copies, contact lynne@newvillagepress.net.
Poetry and prose by artists, writers, and activists who’ve taught workshops in U.S. criminal legal institutions, including acclaimed writers Ellen Bass, Joshua Bennett, Jill McDounough, E. Ethelbert Miller, Idra Novey, Joy Priest, Paisley Rekdal, Christopher Soto, and Michael Torres; the late arts in corrections pioneers Buzz Alexander and Judith Tannenbaum; and Guggenheim Award-winning choreographer Pat Graney. These educators demonstrate a diverse range of experiences. Among the questions they ask: Does our work support the continuation or deconstruction of a mass incarcerating society? What led me to teach in prison? How do I resist the “savior” or “helper” narrative? A book for anyone seeking to understand the prison industrial complex from a human perspective.
All author royalties from this book will be donated to Dances for Solidarity, a project that brings arts opportunities to people incarcerated in solitary confinement.
New review in The Good Life Review!
ArtFuse wrote an astute and generous review of That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It!
Listen to an episode of On the Margin where writer, poet, activist, and anthology contributor E. Ethelbert Miller interviews Leigh about the book!
Interview with Leigh about That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It on Pigeon Pages!
ID: Book with FREELAND printed in large black letters. The word is broken at FREE due to the book’s width, so FREE appears stacked atop LAND. The name “LEIGH SUGAR” is printed in all caps in deep blue on the bottom
AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER
Alice James Books, 2025 | For review copies or interviews, contact Genevieve Hartman
In her debut collection FREELAND, poet and editor Leigh Sugar obsessively searches form and language to communicate what happens in the U.S. mass incarceration system. Through the lens of a young woman in a relationship with an incarcerated writer, FREELAND follows this impossible love story while drawing compelling and 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.
An Alice James Award and Jake Adam York Prize Finalist, FREELAND “is a book in which possibility is with every word measured against reality, and… with every word reality is shown to fall short.”(Shane McCrae) FREELAND troubles traditional expectations of “the book” and “the poem,” switching between received poetic form - including an astounding 16-sonnet-cycle (to represent the beloved’s 16-year prison sentence) - and experimentations with the visual aspect of the poem on the page. FREELAND simultaneously examines, embodies, and reproduces the ideas, narratives, and feelings it linguistically probes; it is this mimetic effect - the book becoming a portal for the reader to live inside the speakers’ experience - that launches FREELAND – and Sugar – into literary lineages of socially-engaged revolutionary writers like Claudia Rankine and C.D. Wright.
Driven by the central theme of a “love confined by the state,” Sugar’s “formally inventive” debut (Edward Hirsch) is at once incisive and compassionate; critical and imaginative. FREELAND’s anger and grief is matched - and sometimes overwhelmed – only by its reaching towards true empathy and abolition.