More than Just Words: Women's Poetry and Resistance at Cook County Jail

Abstract

JAIL IS, AMONG MANY OTHER THINGS, a liminal space. It is aplace of crisis, a place where the life narratives of those who have been incarcerated are ruptured. For most of those detained in a county jail, it is a place be tween arrest and conviction, a place of waiting, a twilight zone where rules arbitrarily shift, roommates come and go, tier assignments change for no apparent reason. At Cook County, where I have been writing with women for over seven years, it is a place of radical dislocation, in which the writing that emerges often becomes both grounding and liberating. Words come together to knit broken narratives, break through silence, and create new worlds, new visions. Within the dehumanizing social practices of the jail, writing becomes an act of resistance, sometimes ob vious, sometimes masked. Some of the women write against the official discourse of the jail, some write with it, some do both at the same time. The writing is dangerous because it proclaims a making and remaking of