Colossus: Freedom an Anthology of Voices Across the Carceral Wasteland

COLOSSUS: FREEDOM is a new collection of poetry and prose focused on the impact of Incarceration on individuals and their families.

COLOSSUS: FREEDOM is a collection of poetry and prose focused on the theme of freedom. The poems and essays speak of the experience of incarceration from the perspective of currently incarcerated individuals, formerly incarcerated individuals and their family members.

The Colossus series of books consistently exceeds expectations. They have featured, and are edited by, some of my favorite poets. They fearlessly address some of the most pressing issues of our time and place. In this latest of their offerings, they address freedom. It's difficult to know, in this colonized space, in this space that still seems unsure about the value of the freedom of some while loudly championing the freedoms of others, how to enter a meaningful conversation on the subject. Is freedom taking a grenade launcher to a sandwich place? Is it the ability to love and marry where we choose? Is it the man shrieking at a stewardess or the parents supporting their child's identity? There are some excellent questions in Colossus: Freedom. Enter and be changed.--K Shuck, 7th Poet Laureate Emerita of San Francisco

Incarceration resembles death by a thousand cuts--the theft of life in small slices--the theft of time from a human life is cruel and outside the natural order of things. In a nation that imprisons more humans than any other industrialized nation on earth, the interruption in the rhythm of family, community, the human existence is a disturbance with profound implications that arise from isolation, disconnection, and the impotence offered in the inability to protect the most basic unit of humanity our bodies or the bodies of loved ones. These are stories of separation, pain, and grief but they are also stories of continued humanity, memory, and joy. These are human stories like the ones found in all neighborhoods, families, countries, all over this planet. These writers speak to us about family, love, loss, justice, trauma, and the event of being human. This work wants to be read, heard, digested and remembered as a part of what colors being human at this time. These are pieces of Americana starring loved ones, the bogey man, and the myriad number of ways in which life in modernity is a difficult place for so many subsets of people marked as disposable and the ways in which we continue to complicate the event of being alive and human in a world that values material things over flesh and blood. Like a prison sentence this work affects everybody involved--the writer, the reader, the perpetrator, the victim(s), the system, those who make decisions and those who suffer the consequences of decisions made.--Ayodele Nzinga, MFA, Ph.D., Poet Laureate, Oakland CA

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Anthology.