the corridor closes at both ends

Abstract

the corridor closes at both ends is a poetry collection that explores control and confinement through personal experiences of queerness, gender nonconformity and prison visits within the frame of Northpointe’s COMPAS recidivism questionnaire. The writing blurs the borders of what was, what is, what isn’t, and what could be, attempting to work in a space that rejects the logics of control that operate in systems, selves, language and relationships, and that are made efficient through violent acts of separation. This collection also confronts and engages with various archives: state and private data archives like the information collected from COMPAS questionnaires in the service of control, Michel Foucault’s use of institutional and personal archives to expose the construction of control systems in History of Madness, and also what Kelly Lytle Hernández calls a rebel archive. These poems, as a part of a rebel archive, move against the gender binary and carceral logics to affirm other acts of resistance.