Sonnets from a Cell by Bradley Peters

Moving from riots to mall parkades to church, the poems in Bradley Peters’ debut Sonnets from a Cell mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang and contemporary lyricism in a way that is tough and tender, that is accountable both to Peters’ own days “caught between the past and nothing” and to the structures that sentence so many “to lose.” Written behind doors our culture too often keeps closed, this is poetry reaching out for moments of longing, wild joy and grace.

Drawing on his own experiences as a teenager and young adult in and out of the Canadian prison system, Peters has written both a personal reckoning and a damning and eloquent account of our violence- and enforcement-obsessed capitalist and patriarchal cultures.

Praise for Sonnets from a Cell: 

“In Sonnets from a Cell, Peters distills liberation from his experiences of incarceration through the confines of the sonnet form with remarkable vulnerability and wit. These technically refined poems upend notions of who is “free” and who is “protected” by providing a nuanced, emotional framework for why the abolition of prison systems is so urgent. In his elegant and poignant debut, Peters writes with a refreshing and immediately memorable voice, inviting us to experience his thoughtful perspective as soon as we “[e]nter the cell and whisper Here I am.” — from the jurors of the Raymond Souster Award

“I’m struck by how artful a made thing this book is, a balance of real humility and expertise. An incredible feat.” — Sheryda Warrener, author of Test Piece and Floating Is Everything

Press Coverage for Sonnets from a Cell:

Bradley Peters: Sonnets from a Cell, solitary confinement, and how a sonnet is like prison — Q with Tom Power (CBC)

“In Sonnets from a Cell doors clang. Chains rattle. The lines of the poems are bars. In the cells, one lives either in solitary, going mad, or with a cellmate, living in distrust because the cell already owns you. Inmates look out through the bars. The bars are like teeth. There are toothbrushes. Often the toothbrushes are filed down into shivs. When they are thrust through ribs, other bars around the heart, people die.” — Harold Rhenisch, The British Columbia Review

“This collection of poems, Sonnets from a Cell by Bradley Peters, drops the reader into the horror of the prison-industrial system with both vulnerability and wit, pulling back the doors with a visceral understanding of something many of us never see or experience. Bradley Peters did though—wending his way in and out of Canadian prisons as a young man—and he had the talent and focus to turn that horror into art and a damning indictment of the system.” — Kara-Leah Grant, Whistler Writers Festival

“Ultimately, Sonnets from a Cell does what the best poetry collections do—it forces the reader to see the world differently, to sit with discomfort, and to reconsider the relationship between form and experience. By inhabiting the strictest of poetic traditions while exposing its limitations, Peters crafts a collection that is as much about poetry as it is about survival, resilience, and the struggle for identity within confinement.” — Zaria Szabo, Hamilton Review of Books

“These striking sonnets follow patterns they can’t seem to break, feed and fuel each other with a prisoner’s vocabulary, rage at the machine and cry for help, and seek meaning in the widening dialogical chasm between form and content.” — Owen Percy, The Ampersand Review