[This post was written by guest contributor Deborah Buchanan.]
Lists of things, things to do, things to remember—and what you wish you didn’t know. Direct and simple cataloguing, yet it feels as if the letters are burning as you read them. Then there are poems, one on the life of an older prisoner, one on the different names of prisoners and their daily work. Or there are strange catalogs of conversations. In C.D. Wright’s book One Big Self, you aren’t quite sure if these conversations come from the poet or are something she overheard. Or maybe something imagined from interactions when she and the photographer Deborah Luster visited three separate prisons in Louisiana.
Though the book is organized around different headings, they all seem to bleed into one another, as if memory and experience are jumping back and forth. Phrases repeat, people return, someone new arrives. Direct recording is interspersed with surrealistic riffs, and all of this builds slowly as a visceral experience of being in prison, where we are there in the heat and confinement.
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Wright says that when she was working on this book, she didn’t want to judge anyone or exonerate them. But the porous web between poverty and illiteracy and crime can’t be avoided here, though it is never actually mentioned, and the pain and insanity of this kind of locking up of people leaps off the page. At the same time, Wright allows the complex beauty and tragedy of people’s lives to speak directly to us. It’s a powerful, intense book that remains honest because of Wright’s pared down writing, her words carefully carrying across to us a world we have mostly chosen to ignore.
See also:
One Big Self: Finding The Noble Vernacular (C.D. Wright / Deborah Luster)
