One Big Self
Photographs by Deborah Luster
Text by C.D. Wright
Twin Palm Publishers, 2004, $60.00

           Count your fingers
           Count your toes

So begins the text of One Big Self, a photographic and poetic collaboration of witness and controlled, subtle protest. The work explores the lives of men and women in three Louisiana prisons by presenting their voices and faces to the society that placed them within the strict system of structure and marginality. The project intimately confronts the void between separation and connection by bringing visibility to these institutions that have become emblematic of our America.

The theme of counting appears repeatedly in these poems, recreating the fixation on time, length of sentences, and the rigid, monotonous schedule to which incarcerated men and women are bound. This anaphora, "Count your?," also calls up inventory, people as part of a larger governmental inventory, the inventory of self and possessions, and an historical inventory of our collective experience. The content suggests cultural critique, but resists didacticism or moralizing through the voice of a distanced speaker who buries commentary within a larger, fragmented narration. The voice is multitudinous, and includes detached observations: "The men pretty much all have ripped chests"; quotations from prisoners: "I miss driving"; historical blurbs: "Corrections Corporation of America increased its inmate mandays by 12%"; and references to both the mass culture of the outside world: "Louisiana bumper sticker: Jesus Don't Leave Earth Without Us"; and the subculture of prison: "The women's units are named for signs of the zodiac, Capricorn is lockdown." By juxtaposing these often disparate fragments, Wright creates a web of connections in which even individuals isolated from the rest of the world interweave within larger societal contexts.

The text reads as one continuous poem, occasionally interrupted by sub-poems that exist in the form of blocks on the page. In these, Wright often addresses the reader directly, as in the poem, "My Dear Conflicted Reader." Using the letter as a mode of communication, Wright stresses the tie between reader and speaker, and reader and poet. An odd displacement of self arises as Wright pushes the correlation further to suggest alignment between her audience and the prisoners, through the use of a shifting, ambiguous "you" that applies to the prisoners as well as the reader: "Friend, Did you happen to violate the law."

While the book deals with grave and emotional subject matter, it resists becoming a forum for judgement or opinion through its controlled rhythm as well as the tone of the speaker, both of which remain objective and systematic. At times, there exists a present and compelling voice, but it is one of cathartic acceptance, of blunt emotion: "It gets old / The way we do things." Even here, the divisions are messy; the reader is left with the question of whether the lines of poetry come from the speaker or from the inmates, as in what appears on the last page and is arguably the most loaded line in the entire text: "NO ONE NO BODY IS BAD FOREVER," which puts a spin on an earlier quotation, "And another thing: Nothing And No One Is Bad Forever-Willie." Wright repeatedly re-forms the inmates' own words within her own, further muddying our understanding of the speaker and redirecting the agency and voice to the prisoners themselves. Her voice becomes a medium, like the book itself, to make others' experiences seen and heard. The pull of the poetry and the strength of the emotion drawn from the work arise not from the speaker's commentary, but from allowing the reader to follow the build-up and momentum of repetitions and observations.

Although this project risks criticism for placing prisoners on display for a free, upper-middle class audience, the work carefully acknowledges the privilege of the author and her "Dear Affluent Reader," and the absurdity of the space between both the author and her subjects, and the reader and the book's subjects. Although Wright draws analogies between these factions, the parallel always rests on the conditional, on the metaphor, realizing that the readers will never find themselves in prison in Louisiana. The attempt is made to connect, to fill the shoes: "If I were you: / Screw up today, and it's solitary?," but the knowledge of the lines that cannot be crossed are repeatedly asserted, "I don't have a clue, do I."

The metaphor extends from the prisoners within the system to represent the prisoners (all of us) living within present-day America. Wright reveals the prison system as a corporation, furthering the suggestion of our modern American society as one big prison, or (a play on the title) one big cell. She references Wal-Mart and McDonalds in her dry, witty commentaries: "Over six trillion served, two million put away." The suggestion is that, although we dear readers are not in jail, we exist within a larger systematic and rigid structure that depersonalizes and normalizes our individual experience. Although Wright universalizes the experience of loss of self, she avoids marginalizing the experience of the prisoners; the suggestion is not that a trip to Wal-Mart is akin to a trip to prison, but that the inclination to incarcerate so many of our citizens spreads to other aspects of society.