Verses Witness: Reimagining Carceral Spaces through Poetry

Despite growing global concern over mass incarceration and carceral capitalism, the architecture of imprisonment remains largely inaccessible, obscured and inscrutable, even to prison reformers and designers. In this context, first-hand accounts by prisoners are crucial for revealing the material and affective dimensions of carceral space, especially when conveyed through literature. Over the centuries, many imprisoned figures have turned to prose and poetry to express their struggles and spatial experiences, inscribing confinement onto their bodies and words. 
From Oscar Wilde to Nazim Hikmet, Mahmoud Darwish to countless unnamed voices, prison poetry has served as both testimony and resistance, offering a powerful lens into the lived realities of incarceration and forming a transhistorical, transgeographic archive of carceral experience. This article focuses on Canadian poet Bradley Peter’s Sonnets from a Cell (2023) in particular to examine how prison poetry can illuminate the psychological, material, and architectural contours of confinement. Through a literary and spatial reading of Peters’ work, it explores how poetic expression maps the lived experience of confinement and reveals how bodies perceive, endure, and resist carceral design. Grounded in abolitionist thinking, the article proposes a dialogue between poetry and architecture to reimagine carceral spaces and ultimately question their continued existence and the role of prison designers.