Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist's Observations from Prison - Softcover

Ken Lamberton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1562791168 ISBN 13: 9781562791162

Publisher: Mercury House, 1999

Synopsis

From Mark Slouka, San Francisco Chronicle: Ken Lamberton would like you to believe his book, ``Wilderness and Razor Wire,'' is about the smell of creosote and rain on the wind, about hawkmoths dipping from the wells of cactus. Don't believe him. Don't be misled by the drawings of brittlebush and silverleaf oak (all done by Lamberton himself), or the well-intentioned, avuncular foreword by Richard Shelton, who taught Lamberton writing in prison workshops and at the University of Arizona. Though the nature writing here may be some of the best to come our way in a generation, this is not first and foremost a book about poppies and peppergrass. It is about the soul in pain. Reading it is like chatting with someone on the street and suddenly noticing there is blood running down his side. All of which is to say that Lamberton (for the past 12 years an inmate of Tucson's Santa Rita Prison) has written something entirely original: an edgy, ferocious, subtly complex collection of essays on the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, whose true subject, and greatest accomplishment, may be its own narrative voice.

About this title

About the Author

Ken Lamberton lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he writes about the nature of the desert outside his window. His essays are appearing in magazines like Manoa, South Dakota Review, Northern Lights, Alligator Juniper, Green Mountains Review, Puerto Del Sol, and the Gettysburg Review, and, most recently, David Quammen's anthology The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000 and Scott Slovic's anthology Getting Over the Color Green. He is a former nonfiction editor for the Sonora Review and is currently completing his MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona.

Reviews

Incarcerated naturalist Lamberton's strange and compelling debut examines the flora, fauna and microecology of an Arizona prison while describing the author's life before and during his sentence. Lamberton is a former biology teacher who has now spent over a decade behind bars for his relationship with a teenage student. After his conviction, he became a prolific nature writer, publishing largely in literary magazines. (A year free on appeal saw him become a nonfiction editor of the Sonora Review.) Lamberton's measured and exemplary prose follows the interactions among the prisoners, their built environment and the birds and plants they encounter there, tracing connections disturbing and consoling, ecological and metaphorical. Africanized killer bees arrive and depart, as does a terroristic guard; brittlebrush and goldpoppy's tough seeds (adapted to Arizona droughts) imply Lamberton's own need for endurance. The overcrowded facility's on-site disposal of toilet water ironically "turned this bleak place into a wildlife island, a rest stop and refuge for wings and beaks and talons." A few chapters near the end of the book put the desert biology on hold for straightforward accounts of Lamberton's recent travails. Usually, though, the book's two genresAfirst-person prison journal and third-person nature-descriptionAcomplement each other. (Lamberton is especially good on insects, on ground-level flora and on the sometimes brutal criminal justice bureaucracy.) Arizona poet and essayist Richard Shelton (Going Back to Bisbee) offers a warm, persuasive introduction. Lamberton suggests that "I learn more by walking across this same plot of ground again and again than if I had the whole world to explore": his deeply moved readers are likely to believe him.(Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Short, unbuffed essays that shuttle restlessly between natural history and prison life, and the unexpected moments of interpenetration, from inmate Lamberton. A few years back, Lamberton made a real bad move. Married and with three children, a respected high school science teacher, he ran off with a 14-year-old student. It was love, he says, consensual if stupid beyond utterance. He got 12 years in jail. There he has toiled imaginatively to avoid death by boredom (and by fist and boot, as sex offenders get little respect in-house or out): he has turned to the natural world, and writing, to escape into his head. ``My wilderness is a prison,'' he acknowledges, but one that experiences the seasons, the weather, and, though not teemingly, plant and animal life. It is not solace that Lamberton seekshe is ready to suffer for his crime and the pain it has causedbut a chance to keep his brain and soul from atrophying, and to chew on small ironies: As a harvester ant scuttles across the prison yard, he realizes that ``in subterranean (at least partially) masonry cells, a single-sexed, non-reproducing horde of workers . . . unwillingly serve a colony much like his own. These are are quick essays, for the encounters are perforce brief and circumscribed: on the seasonal migration of birds through the yard, where they would overnight in the few spare trees that existed before prison officials cut down as being too civilized for inmates; on a tarantula hawk shadowing its prey; or on the spider itself, its fangs piercing the armor of a beetle ``with a primeval sound, a sound out of the Devonian.'' The writing is stony and unmediated with humor, though warmed by Lambertons remorse, and cautionary; unless youve been there, you can't begin to imagine how bad prison life is, even in medium security. ``I'd rather watch bugs,'' says Lamberton of all prison amusements, for the moths and bees and jimsonweed are his communicants, if not his salvation. (50 line drawings) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Wilderness and Razor Wire

STAINED HANDS AND CHARACTER FLAWS From this upper bunk where I write, a narrow window allows me a southern exposure of the desert outside my cell. An expanse of razed ground, marked with an artificial horizon of galvanized steel webbing, fills the lower two thirds of the frame. But beyond the fence, an entire basin of creosote, mesquite, and cholla leans up against the hunched shoulders of the Santa Rita Mountains at the Mexican border. This evening, coyotes call me with borderless voices from the desert's fringe, complaining about their vagrant allotment in life. I would gladly trade places with them.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mercury House
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1562791168
• ISBN 13: 9781562791162
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240