ISSUE 01: STATE(D) VIOLENCE
ABOUT
ALEX TRETBAR
Alex Tretbar wrote the chapbooks According to the Plat Thereof (Ethel, 2025) and Kansas City Gothic (Broken Sleep, 2025). As a Writers for Readers Fellow with the Kansas City Public Library, he teaches free writing classes to the community. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Always Crashing, Annulet, APARTMENT, Bat City Review, Callaloo, Coma, mercury firs, Protean, Seneca Review, Works & Days, and elsewhere.
STATEMENT
The attached digital chaplet contains excerpts from Public Haunts, a manuscript-in-progress concerned with the compression, dissolution, and carceralization of public spaces. Every day, language is deployed to mutate space and estrange us from each other. This is not a new phenomenon, but as a person recently released from prison, I cannot help but register the familiar carceral discourses and architectures haunting the so-called "free world."
What does it mean when the Chicago Park District tells us that "natural areas" are only "open" from "dawn to dusk"? How can a "natural area" ever be closed? Such language weaponizes nature, aims it at those who might want to sleep there in peace, mutates a public space into an instrument of criminalization.
And when, as a result, people are forcibly transferred from the carceralized public space to the private space of the literal prison, they are met once more with language that fragments identity and abstracts the body—a denaturing of the natural.
My hope is that these poems elucidate the frightening similarity between the U.S. public sphere and the U.S. prison cell.