“The wren nesting in the razor wire”: Lyric Containment, Captive Persons, and Animal Life

Animals turn up everywhere in texts written from prison, where they form part of surprisingly complex ecosystems and serve as symbols of freedom and abjection. This essay examines the figure of the animal in poems written in u.s. and other prisons. For some imprisoned writers, animals represent the dehumanization produced by carceral regimes that attend to only bare life; for others, animals are lively cocreators of sympoietic worlds who help to imagine liberation. Animals in these poems reveal the limits of racialized and settler modes of thought, whose damaging hierarchies of human and animal being are materialized in the prison industrial complex. They also unsettle lyric poetry’s claim to express the inalienable and universal humanity that endures even in conditions of atrocity. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of the politics of being, this article uses abolitionist frameworks to think through the genres of both the human and the lyric.