It took a minute to track them all down – some cats like to put a parole hold on the good stuff – but the forty-one volumes of poems, novels, histories, plays, and essays splayed across the top bunk before me represent the mental diet of literary work I’ve fed my being over the past year and some change since having met Reginald “call-me-Dwayne” Betts in the flesh here at Valley State Prison (VSP) in early 2023.
I’ve read them all at least twice, written essays about each, and some have inspired my crew to integrate their meaning into how we have built our word-nerd community. If you’ll indulge it, I’d like to share with you the books from the Freedom Library that have tattooed my soul and give you a run-down on how impactful Dwayne’s gifts have been for folks here.
Between my college classes, the never-ending rabbit hole queries on EBSCO my laptop enables, curating an anthology of carceral poems with my writing mentor Benjamin Frandsen, facilitating the Barz Behind Bars (B3) performance poetry workshop I co-founded, my in-prison Peer Health Educator job, the fifteen hours of weekly public service work related to my academic Honor Society standing, and writing for the Vanguard, leisure time for me is scarce. Sometimes I’ve wished I was still a gladiator school knuckle-headed screw-up stuck in the hole, just so that I’d have nothing to prevent me from absolutely devouring the offerings staring me down from the smoothly crafted dayroom shelving as I come and go about my program.
There is something to be said about prioritizing reading while hustling through life, even while serving a life sentence. If you love literature like I do, then you already get it, but this list would be thrice as long had I not already been waist-deep in my own transformation journey and working to master the fine art of self-dissection when Dwayne and his books slid through.
As an older head, I’d already been up on Dwayne’s earlier work Bastards Of The Reagan Era before diving into his Felon, and though my inner battle-rapper will always hunger for the intellectual street edge of how the voice of Bastards is so emblematic of how Dwayne communicates off the page in real life, there is a maturity of tone and brutal honesty that Felon delivers better than almost anything else I’ve ever read, in any form. Dwayne does moral reckoning like nobody else – the humility, regret, and candor just bleeds out.
Terrance Hayes’ Lighthead, Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, my dude Randall Horton’s classic {#289-128}: Poems, and Dwayne’s Felon form the poetry canon from whom we’ve curated three poems each to construct the curricular DNA of the B3 Poetry Workshop experience. John’s A Refusal To Mourn The Deaths, By Gunfire, Of Three Men In Brooklyn is a foreal-foreal masterpiece, Dr. Horton’s Sorry This Not That Poem remains my favorite lick of all time, and I dare say his A Primer For Surviving A Traffic Stop has no equal. When you find a better narration of the absolute police power paragon problem facing persons of color in America, holla back – until then, please sit down.
Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination, A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, The Essential Ethridge Knight, and Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead each sucker-punched me with thoughtful jabs I’d not been expecting. A song by the Police moved me to chew on Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, and in a caffeinated weekend fury I layered Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular, Elizabeth Alexander’s Antebellum Dream Book, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, and Adrian C. Louis’ Random Exorcisms. It was the re-reads that really started to reveal perhaps how my lens could change how a poem hit me, and thus, change its impact. Being conscious of who the poets were informed my ability to sublimate my own urge to project meaning into everything. Reading poetry demands empathy.
Szymborska’s View With A Grain Of Sand, Thom Gunn’s Selected Poems, Patrick Rosal’s Brooklyn Antediluvian, Joy Harjo’s How To Become Human, The Essential Neruda, and Langston Hughes’ Selected Poems collectively took me past the sandbar, challenged my swimmer’s instinct to fight the undertow of meaning, and allowed me the chance to figure out how to practice submitting to an author’s intentionality. Poetry particularly has taught me how to let language have its way with me.
Growing up inundated with the rhyme schemes of all genres of popular music and willingly indoctrinated by my early addiction to Yo MTV Raps, it took me some time to etch-a-sketch my inner DJ’s taste for the scheme of lyrical rhyme; but once I liberated myself from that sonic handcuff, the vacancies, subtle minimalism, and the many nuances of poetry writ large really started to move upon me. It was as if I was seeing the words for the first time.
A small but powerful work by Airea D. Matthews, titled Simulacra, delivered to me a bar I remain so very tempted to wrap in a song: “Pleasure is crying, starved.” Man… It was because of Airea’s book that I began to think that perhaps one day, sans MFA, even from the cell, someone from our carceral cohort might could compete for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Might could.
The nonfiction biographies that swallowed me whole were Randall’s Dead Weight, Wilbert Rideau’s In The Place Of Justice, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Randall, who is a bonafide living icon and performance poetry mentor who allows me to call and speak to him regularly, set the bar for what transformation looks (and reads) like. He traveled us all vividly from the incubator, to the Suzuki Samurai, to Seven Locks, to Roxbury, to D.C., to Chicago, to Albany, through the head-fake from Central State, and to the showing up every day ethic of being a fully tenured professor with seven felony convictions at the University of New Haven.
Resurrection narratives defy civic death.
While Wilbert has carved himself into the carceral journalism Mount Rushmore, it was what he later told Caits Meissner for PEN America’s “The Sentences That Create Us” about “not having the freedom we had is not a reason to do nothing,” that really prompted me to fashion a shank and take a man-sized stab at carceral journalism myself. What you’re reading is that effort in motion. Baldwin’s Fire burned so damn ferociously in my mind, I started excising his most worthy barz and began fashioning remix poems and rap verses taken entirely from his raw work.
That remix effort has became the hallmark of a Ben Free Project anthology work I hope allows us to pay homage to the literary greats whose shoulders everybody who thinks they might be able to write will eventually climb upon. These three books in particular should be required reading in every prison college English class.
As for novels, I must admit it took me a minute – a long minute – to get over my own stubborn fiction bias. For years, I’ve myopically derided fiction, thinking it to be the guilty man’s elixir, doing nothing more than placating us while we’re in the county jail fighting our cases. Fiction provides an escapism that lets us avoid confronting the trauma of arrest, the loss of freedom, the usual guilt we try in vain to evade, and the prospect of imprisonment. It was the Stephen King, James Petterson, and hood-novella distraction of it all that soured me after the gavel pounded.
When I finally caught the chain, crash-landed into my concrete future, hit the yard, climbed the tier, and settled in, realism crowded out the fakery of storytelling. For me, history, nonfiction, and philosophy took over my content menu. That is, until I read Mitch Jackson’s The Residue Years. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer’s “believe me shady” quoteless steelo hooked me good. Finally, a novel that read exactly like how I spoke in my everyday parlance that didn’t compromise on emotional intelligence.
Mitch did that.
There was a hard pivot to Hanif Ardurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, because it just straight-up felt like I was reading my own gnashing take on the culture. Then Amor Towles’ A Gentleman In Moscow drew me in with the house arrest angle, as if teasing me with a familiar parallel of being in prison with a laptop, but not able to surf the net. Hisham Matar’s The Return fed my middle east spy thriller thirst with an emotional tug at my desire for familial reunification, while Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road To The Deep North snatched me with a POW power struggle arc.
I reread James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head after Michael Latt was shockingly murdered and ripped from our community. I was desperately hunting for another path that might travel me to a place of better understanding about how best to cope with the loss of a new friendship cut short by death.
I’d met Michael along with my writing partner The Mundo Press when Scott Budnick brought him and Sol Guy into VSP for a film screening, and Michael quoted Baldwin in a tender inscription he wrote into the palm of an outline of his own hand for one of our art projects. A gospel singer’s tale seemed to evoke the sort of social justice struggles Michael amplified in his work. John Keene’s Counternarratives, Samuel Beckett’s Three Novels, and Saul Bellow’s Collected Stories became my companions on the big yard on Sundays, nudging me back to fiction.
I’ve read my dog-eared copy of the Best American Magazine Writing of 2019 perhaps eight times from front to back and dug into its corners a thousand times hunting and thieving insights concerning form, prose, and theme. Great writing never disappoints. The Practice Of Poetry, edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell is present in the room for all of our B3 Poetry Workshop exercises, helping our practitioners steer and frame the work. Lynn Nottage’s Ruined and Sweat have become staples for our excursions into drama, along with select plays by the enigmatic Baraka.
We can literally open up either work to any page, point at a line, and have our cohort read it aloud, and boom – the room is teleported. Lynn and Baraka waste no words. Another spoken word treasure is Best Contemporary Monologues, edited by Lawrence Harbison. For carceral audiences, this is the trove of pieces that most often gets our cohort excited and eager to rehearse. We give the work to our guys without the pre-text cues that direct the actor about the character’s motivation in order to encourage unique interpretations of the script.
Consumed by all things mass incarceration, Randall Kennedy’s Race, Crime, And The Law, and Elizabeth Hinton’s From The War On Poverty To The War On Crime are lassoed together by thick rubber bands and read in tandem against all manner of EBSCO essays and journals commenting on the scholarship focusing upon carceral studies. Each have become diving boards into cited works that have monopolized my time as I try to frame my own grasp of how crime, politics, and different levers of the economy have worked to bring about the vile management of humans in America since before the Civil War. As a member of the incarcerated citizenry, it is my duty to vacuum the knowledge that avails itself to me and interrogate the chasm between what I can access and what is otherwise knowable, yet still unknown to me.
For me, reading represents the constant pursuit of truth, meaning, and cortex development.
Be it sorrow, loss, love, regret, pain, hope, fear, bliss, power or the unknown, poetry particularly has continued to feed, soothe, and provoke me in equal measure. The novels have delivered me into archetypes that spur my imagination and suggest I look up from the page and interrogate my own life. Works of nonfiction and history are just that – real life, conveyed by real folks, about the things that make a life – or waste it.
I only discovered Jason Reynolds’ fiction work because I got to hear Dwayne talk to him on his Freedom Takes podcast, which is available for free on the Edovo app and featured on my DOC-issued tablet device. Dude is brilliant. I just got to listen to an audiobook version of his work, and became evermore shin-kicked into submission about the power of good fiction rooted in visceral truth.
Such is the lens through which everything read is observed while standing in a place where a number serves as the placeholder for personhood and the action work of becoming is fractured by bad data, generational trauma, cultural rot, bias and fear. Escapism has its purpose, but reality is a crushing anvil that demands every word be read, spoken, heard, and lived out with clear-eyed exactitude. The books teach it all.
My world has exploded with people and possibility since meeting Dwayne and having the Freedom Library available to me. I am but one person, but my time with these 41 books this past year tells a tale that will be revealed in the work I and others do hereafter using our words to convey experience. What I can tell you without reservation is that carceral readers are excavating meaning, communities are being forged around books, and the prison is arcing – towards the justice found in the power of literature.
Freedom begins with a book.
To support Dwayne, David, Gabby, Mike, Steven, and the staff at Freedom Reads in their mission to deliver a Freedom Library to every prison cell block in America, visit www.freedomreads.org.
