FREELAND

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.

Advance Praise

“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 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

"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

Media

- A “Most Anticipated Debut Collection of 2025” - Electric Literature

This astonishing collection tracks the improbable connection between the speaker and her incarcerated beloved. Leigh Sugar’s close narration seizes your attention, daring you to look away from the tenderness and brutality of the world. Freeland raises urgent questions about prison abolition, mental healthcare, race, and selfhood. —Skylar Miklus