Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays

In this riveting work, poet Horton (Pitch Dark Anarchy) chronicles his rise from prison to the hallowed halls of academia. In an imagined dialogue with “Cutout Man,” Horton’s name for the New York City sculpture that honors Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, he recounts the psychological impact of the racism that has followed him since his birth in segregated 1960s Alabama and includes the guilt he carried as a young man over his bootlegging grandfather’s 1930s incarceration. As Horton writes, the transgressions of his forebears saw similar manifestations in his own life, “operating below the surface to stay surface level” while living on the streets. Lyrical passages recall the figurative “prison” Horton inhabited as a Black man in America, and the literal corrections facilities he cycled through in the ’90s on account of seven felony convictions for theft and burglary. Though a passion for writing helped him find a pathway out of prison and, eventually, a tenured position as a professor at the University of New Haven, Horton takes pains to convey that, in a nation riddled with prejudice, his struggles weren’t unique: “I now contemplate whether I even had a choice at all.” This memoir inspires with its depictions of the author’s resilience and galvanizes with its poignant critique of a long-broken system. (Feb.)