One Big Self by C.D.Wright

One Big Self by C.D.Wright

One Big Self by C.D.Wright is a collection of poetry (and photography by Deborah Luster) with aims to “convey a cultural landscape of violent activity, its consequences, [and] its toll.” Wright and Luster visited three Louisianan state prisons to create a portrait of an "American phenomenon." 

There is an Acknowledgments page with notes and thanks in the back of the book: 

The form is experimental, not least of all for the size of the book, purposefully printed in a large, square format. There are snippets of found poetry from manuals, signs within the three prisons Wright took material from within, and from inmate correspondence and conversation.  

The poetry in this collection feels at once disjointed and interwoven, often using fragmentary speech, non-sequiturs, and bits and pieces of a whole to create a big picture; many phrases and lines in the poem echo in later poems, sometimes more than once. This creates a sense of being boxed in, of inevitability, and maybe, too, of the cyclical ways in which conversation returns in instances of incarceration—the repeating of truths and remembrances from the outside as a means of pushing against the box?