Dead Weight
A Memoir in Essays
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Dead Weight chronicles the improbable turnaround of a drug smuggler who, after being sentenced to eight years in state prison, returned to society to earn a PhD in creative writing and become the only tenured professor in the United States with seven felony convictions. Horton’s visceral essays highlight the difficulties of trying to change one’s life for the better, how the weight of felony convictions never dissipates.
The memoir begins with a conversation between Horton and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man statue in New York City. Their imagined dialogue examines the psychological impact of racism on Black men and boys, including Horton’s separation from his mother, immediately after his birth, in a segregated Alabama hospital. From his current life as a professor and prison reformer, Horton looks back on his experiences as a drug smuggler and trafficker during the 1980s–1990s as well as the many obstacles he faced after his release. He also examines the lasting impact of his drug activity on those around him, reflecting on the allure of economic freedom and the mental escapism that cocaine provided, an allure so strong that both sellers and users were willing to risk prison. Horton shares historical context and vivid details about people caught in the war on drugs who became unsuspecting protagonists in somebody else’s melodrama.
Lyrical and gripping, Dead Weight reveals the lifelong effects of one man’s incarceration on his psyche, his memories, and his daily experience of American society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
