#prison literature

[trans-axolotl]

"The quality of the libraries in correctional facilities is generally poor. Without access to the internet, books are one of the only places to turn for incarcerated people who wish to learn, imagine, study or grow. Friends and loved ones on the outside are not allowed to send books directly to people in prison; instead, they must be ordered from an online retailer. Few incarcerated people have loved ones with the resources to purchase and send books at full retail price." -Prison Book Program

support your local books to prisoners project! These projects work to get books into prisons, navigating book bans, meeting specific book requests, and providing crucial community support for incarcerated people. this is a great way to show solidarity with your incarcerated friends, neighbors, and loved ones.

i've set up $5 monthly donation to Books Through Bars Philadelphia, and they also have a book wishlist and information for donating books if that works better for you.

[tagitables]

Prison literature (consider: Boethius, Galileo Galilei, Oscar Wilde, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Adolf Hitler and Antonio Gramsci) is another level of expression :)

[arablit]

Lit & Found: Ahmed Naji & Mona Kareem Talk Prison Literature

As Mona Kareem writes in her introduction to this interview with Egyptian writer Ahmed Naji for The Millions, he has been many types of writer already: “an anonymous blogger, a cultural journalist, a music and arts critic, a novelist, and now a memoirist as well,” whose recent book — Rotten Evidence, translated to English by Katharine Halls — re-invents the genre of “prison literature.” In part,…

[ogaborus]

Suffocation. A poem by Demostene Andronescu

Suffocation. A poem by Demostene Andronescu

Here’s a poem by Demostene Andronescu, who was a political prisoner in communist Romania for 12 years. There’s so much life in me, in whirl I dwell,As if I am a tower where a bellHas rung for an eternity, denied,And all its sounds have multiplied inside.Having no place from where to gush out, ratherThey brawl together and they kill each other,And in the tower overlap, up to the beam.Becoming mad…

[ofstarsandmoonlightt]

Oak’s watched demon slayer lol

[liorlen]

Some illustrations I made for a module as interpretations of some passages from the Welsh poem 'Preiddeu Annwn'

[critical-quoter]

It's the arrogance of men to think so little of women. And it'll be their downfall too.

Gild - Raven Kennedy

[usefulquotes7]

We are products of our past but we don’t have to be prisoners of it. Rick Warren

[thepersonalwords]

Look at the mirror! Who are you? You are not yourself, you are your culture! Do you want to be yourself? Then leave your prison and discover the paths beyond your path!

Mehmet Murat ildan

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

[typewriter-worries]

There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

Persuasion, Jane Austen 

[trans-axolotl]

" “In the year 2024….” read the headline of an editor’s message in a 1970 issue of The Presidio, a publication out of the Iowa State Penitentiary. Even for people in prison, whose primary currency is time itself, the date felt far-fetched. Something so distant, it was more the setting of a science fiction novel than of a real-life possibility. Al Ware, the paper’s incarcerated editor, had just experienced the solar eclipse of the century, though Iowa was outside the range of the total eclipse. He whimsically mused on whether he’d be around for the next one—if he meant alive or still in prison is up for interpretation.

People travel for hundreds and thousands of miles to view total eclipses and consistently have difficulty describing the experience fully with just words. But even a partial eclipse can be a stunning spectacle. For those in prison, whose lives are often drudgery punctuated by fleeting moments of fear, being able to experience something collectively with people beyond the walls is the type of reprieve that buoys the psyche for quite some time.

I sat in prison for the partial eclipse of 2017. A far cry from how Florida prisons handled a total eclipse in 1970, the Federal Bureau of Prisons decided a dusk-like darkening of the sky was a security threat that warranted a total lock-down. Never mind that for half the year the sun set at dinner time, and we were allowed to continue going about our business, jogging on the rec yard, grabbing a book from the library, and just generally moving about the compound. Perhaps some nefarious actors would use the few minutes of diminished daylight in the middle of the day to orchestrate a prison break, or perhaps the reverse, introduce contraband.

It felt like my life came to a screeching halt the moment I was arrested. No longer did I feel like I was living, an active verb, I was merely existing. If I vanished off the face of the Earth, not a single thing would change in the world, so minimal was my presence, so isolated was my life. Headlines flashed across the television screens, one of my only tethers to the outside world. Floods in Houston, fires in California, a mass shooting in Miami. It was as if these events were happening in some other world, one to which I only had the narrowest window...

...And with that, she led us outside. She didn’t ask where the colander had come from, and I did not tell. Its round holes somehow cast crescent shadows, illuminating the laws of physics. The sky darkened but nothing like dusk, a bizarre energy filling the air—or perhaps it was the abject fear that I was risking time in the hole to watch odd-shaped shadows dance on the ground, unable to even look at the eclipse directly.

For days to come, we tried to explain to our friends what it felt like, what those colander hole shadows looked like. It was simply too difficult to describe.

Whether Al Ware is still around to see this eclipse—he would be eighty-two—is unknown. What is known is that at least a few hundred people that experienced the total solar eclipse from prison in the United States in 1970 are still in prison. The next total solar eclipse that can be seen from the contiguous US won’t be until 2044—and unless that’s your release date, I’m sure it feels just as abstract as 2024 felt to the men at the Iowa State Penitentiary back in 1970."

- Watching an Eclipse from Prison, by Morgan Godvin

[feral-ballad]

Linda Hogan, from Dark. Sweet.: New & Selected Poems; “In here"

[Text ID: “I am from a world of secrets like prison doors / That never open.”]

[iris-drawing-stuff]

Sometimes I just get the most nonsensical crossover ideas.

Doki Doki Literature Club! Milgram Edition

Does this make sense? No.

Was it fun to draw? Yes!

And that's what's important!

[thepersonalquotes]

Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.

Bob Marley

[virtuouslibertines69]

"Of course if he wanted to escape, he could do so. The prison was, after all, his own heart." — Haruki Murakami