This issue asks us to imagine and activate a world without prisons: to think beyond Western carceral logics and realities, and to unsettle the colonial- settler mentality of punitive justice. Constellated here is art and writing by currently and formerly incarcerated people, and people working in solidarity with prisoners, aiding us in attaining an abolitionist future.

This issue is also very “Vancouver” in that it gathers beloved contributors from local communities I’ve volunteered and organized with, whom I’ve learned so much from, and who model the way I want to be in the world. I’m thankful to be in conversation with some of these folks in the collaborative form of the interview. Caspar Blanchard and I talk about his experience of incarceration and reflect on our relationship to the Downtown Eastside, past and present. Harsha Walia and I consider art in social justice movements, as do Cecily Nicholson and Manuel Axel Strain in their expansive dialogue on art’s role in community. Strain’s interview is accompanied by a series of drawings that pay homage to friends and community members impacted by colonial violence and control.

At solidarity rallies here we say/sing/shout “from the Salish Sea to Palestine, occupation is a crime,” connecting the occupations of Indigenous lands from a global perspective. Crossing a form of containment called borders, dana qaddah, Nnadi Samuel, Rachelle Cruz, Chi-Leung Lee, and Claire Farley take us from Vancouver to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to the Bay Area to Palestine to Washington D.C. to Beirut, providing artistic and poetic perspectives on prisons, petrostates, and solidarities with Palestinians.

As the Canadian carceral state reaches ever further into our lives through policing and prisons but also psychiatric institutionalization, refugee detention, school liaison officers, and foster care, we must continue to fight to get free of these systems because some of us are in danger – and because none of us are free ’til all of us are free. Magín Manolete’s prints illuminate interlocking systems of oppressive management; Cecily Nicholson’s poetry highlights forms of care and mutual aid; and Rita Wong offers lessons learned from insiders while incarcerated for protecting the land and waters. Rafael Zen comedically critiques a central figure in carceral studies to celebrate the racialized and queer bodies, sex, and desire so often criminalized by the state. Hari Alluri offers prayers to the living and the haunted in poetic meditations across oceans and estuaries, ceremony and sky.

For me, it would have been unethical to guest-edit an issue on carcerality without including the work of incarcerated artists and writers, so thank you to Kelsey Timler and Helen Brown of A.R.T. & Justice for the permission forms, prison visits, and CSC approvals that were required to publish this work. If you could feel the art collected in this folio – if you could touch the texture of the paint and the backs of the canvases – you would see that many of these artworks have been painted on cardboard lids from the boxes of paints given to insiders.¹ Although I’ve seen it over and over again, in prison visits with my dad and when volunteering, it still surprises me that there are so many artists in prison. I am so thankful to Chris, Drew, Paul, Serafim, Tangent, Tristen Bright, and Will for allowing us to share their artworks with you, and to poets Abu-Falestine, Cassandra Rae, D.C.R., Drew, Kevin, Lance, Muhe Cui, Serafim, Trae, and W.W. who allowed us to republish their work from tiptoeing through the concrete tulips.

It’s important to me that this issue begin and end in the right way – with the work of artists and writers with lived experience of incarceration. Angelee Porter’s Hidden Ethereal Love is on the cover, and the issue begins with jaye simpson’s poems, love letters to her nimama and to marginalized people whose lives are differently valued, devalued. Abu-Falestine’s love letter to Palestinian people, his people, is the penultimate text of the issue, which concludes with a return to Angelee’s artwork on healing and transformation.

Christina Sharpe writes, “Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it. I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.”²

All of us here want that too.

— Mercedes Eng

1. These artworks are examples of what Nicole R. Fleetwood calls “carceral aesthetics,” art created in whatever repurposed mediums are available in prisons, art that calls viewers’ attention to the conditions of imprisonment. See Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). ↩︎
2. Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023), 333. ↩︎