Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Concrete Carnival
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
Pseud * blog: https://medium.com/@DannerDarcleight * http://thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2016/04/danner-darcleight-is-pen-name-of-39.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016010577
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016010577
HEADING: Darcleight, Danner, 1976-
000 01152cz a2200217n 450
001 10093817
005 20161105073801.0
008 160229n| azannaabn |a aaa
010 __ |a n 2016010577
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca10405129
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d IEdL
046 __ |f 1976-10-18 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Darcleight, Danner, |d 1976-
372 __ |a Authorship |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Authors |2 lcsh
375 __ |a male
377 __ |a eng
400 1_ |a Dercleight, Danner, |d 1976-
670 __ |a Darcleight, Danner. Concrete carnival, 2016: |b label (Danner Darcleight)
670 __ |a Concrete carnival, 2016: |b ECIP t.p. (Danner Dercleight) data view screen (b. 10/18/1976; prisoner author, writes from a maximum-security prison, where he is serving twenty-five years to life, last name is incorrectly spelled on item)
670 __ |a https://about.me/danner.darcleight, viewed November 4, 2016: |b (Danner Darcleight, correct spelling on his name, beginning his fifteenth year in a maximum-security prison (on a 25 to life sentence). He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing, which he started as a traditional university student, and completed from his prison cell.)
PERSONAL
Born October 18, 1976; married, wife’s name Lily.
EDUCATION:Earned bachelor’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Incarcerated as of c. 2001.
AWARDS:Pushcart Prize nomination.
WRITINGS
Contributor to the anthology City: Essays from the Prison in America, Michigan State University Press (East Lansing, MI), 2014; contributor to periodicals, including Kenyon Review, Stone Canoe, and Minnesota Review; author of a blog.
SIDELIGHTS
Danner Darcleight is a writer who began serving a twenty-five-years-to-life sentence in a maximum-security prison around the year 2001. Raised in the Dominican Republic, Darcleight married ten years into his sentence, meanwhile finished his bachelor’s degree, and found a new purpose when he started attending prison writing workshops. His writings have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Stone Canoe, and the Minnesota Review.
Darcleight published the memoir Concrete Carnival in 2016. The account recalls his heavy drug addiction, which ultimately led to his murdering his own parents. Darcleight turns much of the book, however, into a prison memoir, relating the challenges faced in life in a maximum-security prison. He recalls early temptations before showing his transformation, partly aided by his interest in a prison writing workshop he attended.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly said that “after immersing himself in the work of prison writers,” Darcleight “has written a searing look at life inside the criminal justice system.” In a review in Hippocampus, Meghan Phillips observed that the memoir “balances moments of darkness (of which there are many) with moments of lightness.” Phillips remarked that even when “sharing a happy moment, like cooking dinner with his ‘family,’ Darcleight never lets the reader forget that he is a prisoner and that these moments can disappear as quickly as they came.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor noticed that Darcleight mixes “cohesive chapters on his prison experiences with more rambling ones recalling his early life of privilege.” The same reviewer concluded by calling Concrete Carnival “a provocative work focused on empathy and redemption rather than the setting’s natural grime and melodrama.”
Reviewing the memoir in the Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities, Pamela Wylie commented that “Darcleight’s writing is vigorous, no-nonsense, and, after a few hours with him, may make you also think you are doing time in a high-security prison. Which, I suspect, is the point. If we want to read about prison life, we want to read someone who tells it like it is.” In the memoir, Wylie contended, “we meet a survivor, one who claims that he has made it through the last decade by confronting the spooks within: not by fighting them or denying them, but agreeing, as we all eventually must, to live side-by-side with them.” The reviewer pointed out that “Darcleight has the magic ability to put us right into the cell with him, especially the great times.” Wylie mentioned that by the end of the memoir, “we are left with a fair amount of respect for Darcleight for just surviving.”
In a review in the Collagist, Charles Holdefer commented that the author’s “self-consciously jangly style, also evident in the memoir’s title, can be entertaining, but it wouldn’t be enough to sustain a book. Fortunately, Darcleight inhabits other registers and shows a willingness to own up to his vulnerabilities.” Holdefer reasoned that “Concrete Carnival is a positive example of the importance of prison writing workshops, beyond their psychological utility, because the author’s prose leaps beyond the conventions of classroom writing exercises and stands on its own as absorbing work.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2016, review of Concrete Carnival.
Publishers Weekly, August 1, 2016, review of Concrete Carnival, p. 60.
ONLINE
Collagist, http://thecollagist.com/ (November 26, 2016), Charles Holdefer, review of Concrete Carnival.
Hippocampus, http://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/ (March 1, 2017), Meghan Phillips, review of Concrete Carnival.
Medium, https://medium.com/ (May 8, 2017), author profile.
Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities, http://www.ralphmag.org/ (May 8, 2017), Pamela Wylie, review of Concrete Carnival.
Danner Darcleight is currently serving a 25 year to life sentence in an American prison. His memoir, “Concrete Carnival” will be published in Sept 2016.
Danner Darcleight's essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Stone Canoe, and The Minnesota Review, where he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Two of his essays appear in Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America (Michigan State University Press 2014). He writes from a maximum-security prison, where he is serving twenty-five years to life, and is grateful for the continued support of his loved ones.
Concrete Carnival
Publishers Weekly.
263.31 (Aug. 1, 2016): p60.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Concrete Carnival
Danner Darcleight. Permanent Press, $29.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-57962-437-8
This is a powerful memoir by first-time author Darcleight, who is currently serving 25 years to life for murder, a crime that he barely remembers
committing while deeply addicted to heroin, "a dope-sick animal in a confined space." Locked away, he finds a new kind of "liberty" through
reading and writing, "a freedom understood by losing everything and beginning the slow process of finding yourself anew in your early twenties."
This process is grippingly told in this eloquent memoir of life with the freaks and fiends in various maximum-security institutions: "It's all a
goddamned circus, you'll think to yourself sometimes, a concrete carnival." He learns to live with the violence, drug abuse, isolation, and suicide
around him, eventually beginning a correspondence with a woman who helps him realize that "we survive to find our purpose for others."
Darcleight, whose prison writings have appeared in the Kenyon Review and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was, by his own admission, a
below-average student who was expelled from college. But after immersing himself in the work of prison writers such as Piper Berman and Jean
Genet--as well as consuming "a happy cocktail of stoicism, existentialism, and optimism" from Seneca, Victor Frankl, and Voltaire--Darcleight
has written a searing look at life inside the criminal justice system. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Concrete Carnival." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285724&it=r&asid=a21278dce58ee3830d3e5483c3f5a030. Accessed 25 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285724
REVIEW: Concrete Carnival by Danner Darcleight
March 1, 2017
Review by Meghan Phillips
Tweet
2
Share
Mail
Share
concrete-carnival cover wall of prision with barbed wire with guard tower and sunset in backDanner Darcleight, author of Concrete Carnival (Permanent Press, September 2016), is a promising writer, a devoted friend, and a loving husband. He is also a convicted murderer and recovering heroin addict, serving 25 years to life in an unnamed prison somewhere in the United States.
Early in his memoir, Darcleight admits that his presence in a maximum security prison causes “cognitive dissonance.” White, college-educated, and a self-proclaimed “soft child of privilege,” Darcleight is an anomaly in a penal system with well-known racial and ethnic imbalances. Guards and even other inmates approach him, asking “what’s a nice guy like you….” Because he has a bachelor’s degree “in the land of pre-GED,” he works choice, high-paying (for prison) jobs clerking for well-placed civilians. What saves his memoir from being merely a fish-out-of-water tale is Darcleight’s awareness of and attempts to wrestle with both his place within the prison system and the guilt and grief caused by the crime that got him there.
While Darcleight’s life is undoubtedly the focus of his memoir, he uses his personal experience as an inmate to make broader observations about prison culture in the U.S., especially how people outside of the system view incarceration. The most striking example of this narrative technique is in a chapter titled “Male Gaze.” Darcleight’s memories of being “cracked on” (prison slang for being hit on) as a fresh-faced newjack lead to an examination of “one of the few prison issues the public has an appetite for”: rape. He criticizes pop culture, especially films and television shows, for using rape as a short-hand for evoking the “fear, powerlessness, [and] horror” inmates face, while also acknowledging that prison rape is a real problem.
It might be easy, even expected, for Darcleight to dwell on the bleakness of his life in prison; however, Concrete Carnival balances moments of darkness (of which there are many) with moments of lightness and, perhaps surprisingly, happiness. He describes with great warmth and detail the surrogate family that he has found in follow inmates Whit, Doc, and Yas.
But even while sharing a happy moment, like cooking dinner with his “family,” Darcleight never lets the reader forget that he is a prisoner and that these moments can disappear as quickly as they came: “What we never gave voice to was how precarious is living well in prison—a guard could have walked by, seen a can top I was using as a cutter, declared it a weapon, and carted me off to the Box.” Moments like this serve to jolt the reader back the reality of Darcleight’s situation. No matter how eloquent and intelligent he seems on the page, he is still an inmate. He is one of over two million people in prison in America today, most of whom never get the chance to tell their story.
Concrete Carnival
Danner Darcleight
(The Permanent Press)
Danner Darcleight is serving "twenty-five to life" in an unnamed prison somewhere in the north-eastern part of the United States (he names it "Prison F"). The book takes him from growing up in the Dominican Republic, his entry in an unnamed college, complete with high-jinks that got him kicked out, and, ultimately, to his serious heroin habit which precipitated a murder when someone tried to take his habit away from him.
A year in county jail, and the next twelve or so years in a high security state joint, lead us to understand that Prison F is possibly going to be the place where he will, one day, die of old age.
Darcleight's writing is vigorous, no-nonsense, and, after a few hours with him, may make you also think you are doing time in a high-security prison. Which, I suspect, is the point. If we want to read about prison life, we want to read someone who tells it like it is.
There among the vocabulary of that particular life - - - dompers, keeplocked, The Box, "an eighty-three" (a petition concerning prisoners' civil rights), lock-in, the gate, shanks, "cracked on" - - - we meet a survivor, one who claims that he has made it through the last decade by confronting the spooks within: not by fighting them or denying them, but agreeing, as we all eventually must, to live side-by-side with them. (Unfortunately, at least for me, is his central mot, borrowed from Nietzsche, Was ihn nicht umbringt, macht ihn stärker: "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Some us prefer "What doesn't kill you makes you much more wily the next time around." From what I read in these pages of Concrete Carnival - - - which includes the title - - - gets me to suspect this is Darcleight's real secret pour vivre longtemps et en bonne santé.)
§ § §
Darcleight gives us a list of books that formed his own thoughts on prison life, including Genet's Thief's Journal, George Jackson's Soledad Brotheer, Jack Abbott's In the Belly of the Beast, Bell Gale Chevigny's Doing Time, and H. Bruce Franklin's Prison Writing in Twentieth Century America. Those all qualify as genuine Joint Lit - - - although as Darcleight explains, "What differentiates Genet from the pack is his portrayal of prison sex as consensual and loving."
He very much romanticized the hard scrabble life of the petty thieves he fell in with, several of whom became his sexual partners . . . Stripped of the pretense and trappings of the world, however, he experienced truly tender moments of love and companionship. It made his life behind the wall livable.
And, of course, Genet being Genet, his writings romanticize, equally, such add-ons gimmicks as a prison not unlike a holy cathedral, with holy pinched-out tubes of Vaseline . . . and, alas, body lice crawling up his lover's neck. Darcleight hastily points out that he himself is rather handsome and young looking, so he often gets "cracked on" by many would-be lovers, but that he is 100% straight. It rings true, especially when he recounts his various heterosexual adventures all while salted away in the slammer.
§ § §
Darcleight has the magic ability to put us right into the cell with him, especially the great times. Yes, we learn that there can be great times in the Graybar Hotel when he and his friends Yas and Doc cook up "pitas, baba ghanouj, fried canned beef with an approximation of yogurt dill sauce, or pizza piled ludicrously high with salty meats, various cheeses, fungi and veg," or
in Doc's personal skillet, a solid old Westinghouse given him by a friendly lieutenant for whom he works . . . I made a proper focaccia, a square of just-crisp-enough dough, aromatically speckled with garlic and fresh rosemary from the plant growing in front of Doc's cell . . .
all of which make us want to Google "Danner Darcleight," find out where Prison F is, see if we can finagle a quick visit for dinner. The picture of having one's own garden for herbs between the cellblocks, and at the same time being able to scare up some cans of cuttlefish in their own ink, along with fresh zucchini flowers from the garden, and with fresh dough for garlicky breadsticks. All this doesn't exactly call up our image of the pen. Darcleight reminds us, though, that if one of the guards happens by and spots him cutting the meat with the sharp top of a tomato can, he could dub it a shiv and get him busted and sent to "The Box."
There are other good times that he tells of: during a blackout at the prison, he lit nine yahrzeit candle in his menorah (given to him by his rabbi), and explains how the other cons stopped to look with envy in his cell, beguiled by the gentle lights.
Or the times he is on the telephone with Lily, a lady in the town who answered one of his write-a-prisoner ads . . . and within a year was engaged to him (which ultimately caused the two of them considerable grief when it was found out).
But this is no don't-curse-the-darkness rant. For, as Darcleight explains, when he goes down, he goes way down, and suicidal thoughts bubble up. Until he spoke with a knowledgeable psychologist, he thought that all the rest of us automatically wonder how, when and where we should start slashing ourselves when we get depressed.
Indeed, his obsession with suicide leads to a rather revolting retelling of the time he was an ambulance driver and was called upon to help cut down a man "with a red rubber-coated wire cinched around his throat dangling from a water-stained ceiling beam."
By eighteen, I'd already encountered death in cars, on the sides of the roads, on serene jogging trails in the woods, in public spaces and tiny rooms.
He spends almost fifteen pages on the subject, which for some of us may be too much, including another quote from Nietzsche,
The thought of suicide is a great consolation: with the help of it one has got thorough many a bad night. To think about suicide isn't necessarily to commit suicide. It's to acknowledge the possibility and to acknowledge the precariousness of being alive and to affirm it.
Amidst all this, Darcleight reminds us of the main awful of being in prison. It's the presence of the other prisoners who, whether you like it or not, are going to be your close neighbors for quite some time. He spends about as much time as he does on the suicide watch going on (and on) about a very noisy neighbor, one Chuí, who sings, laughs, whistles, screams, keeps the radio on HIGH, yells to the others across the way, and in general runs at 180 decibels or so all the day and much of the night. When you're in the pokey, you'll never ever get away from the albatross named Chuí. Ever.
At the end, we are left with a fair amount of respect for Darcleight for just surviving, what with the thoughts of doing himself in, for having lived through years where heroin ran his life, helped him to violently harm some of the people he loved the most, made it so that his permanent record will forever and always be skewed by those ominous final words of his sentence: twenty-five-years-to-life.
--- Pamela Wylie
Candid account of life in a maximum security prison.
Darcleight has served more than 17 years of a 25-to-life sentence for murdering his parents while in thrall to addiction. “I am responsible,” he writes, “but absent heroin, I’d still have my parents....Self-loathing accompanies my grief.” The author captures the complex relationship between guilt and imprisonment, arguing that many prisoners endeavor to live an ordered life and “recast [their] predicament into an opportunity for growth.” Darcleight developed a passion for writing and deep friendships: “We understood that we enjoyed better luck than our peers, living better than most of our brethren...[despite] how precarious is living well in prison.” Additionally, he credits marriage to a civilian woman for his stability, though this relationship resulted in a punitive transfer to a distant prison: “Despite being shackled and under armed guard, I feel an exhilarating sense of freedom traveling through the world, sharing the road with citizens.” In asking readers to look beyond “the abstract label of me, the murderer,” he’s able to focus on the absurdities and hidden rituals of imprisonment, starting with the distorted expectations of civilians regarding gangs and violence, “given soft-core gore-porn treatment in pop culture.” Darcleight argues that the fascination with sexual assault between inmates both overstates the problem and simplifies such aspects as staff collusion. “Rape,” he writes, “is one of the few prison issues for which the public has an appetite.” Similarly, drug trafficking within the walls seems inevitable given that “sobriety is indeed a cruel mirror for those who have destroyed like we’ve destroyed.” The author alternates cohesive chapters on his prison experiences with more rambling ones recalling his early life of privilege, a callous youngster careening toward tragedy without realization. The distance between Darcleight’s current perspective and his destructive past underscores his argument that the lives of the imprisoned warrant consideration.
A provocative work focused on empathy and redemption rather than the setting’s natural grime and melodrama.
Pub Date: Sept. 30th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57962-437-8
Page count: 320pp
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 8th, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1st, 2016
Reviewed by Charles Holdefer
Danner Darcleight's recent memoir, Concrete Carnival, has much to say about America's fifty-first state. With over two million inhabitants, this state is more populous than Nebraska or New Hampshire or a dozen other states. This is the state of Incarcerated America.
Danner Darcleight is a prison resident. Convicted of murder, he is currently serving a sentence of twenty-five years to life. Concrete Carnival is lively and troubling and displays literary verve, attempting something more ambitious than insider journalism.
Concrete Carnival dramatizes the singularity of prison life while at the same time showing how it reflects and magnifies American values. It is a generic mash-up of prison sketches, recovery memoir, and love story. It is also a testimony to the power of books.
In many respects Darcleight is an atypical prison resident. White, college-educated, and raised in suburban affluence, he refers to himself as a "soft child of privilege" and acknowledges that his presence in prison inspires cognitive dissonance. "I've got a bachelor's degree," he writes, "and in the land of pre-GED, that makes me a fucking king. For almost my entire incarceration I've worked in offices, clerking for highly placed civilians." After a flirtation with the death penalty, he has managed to work his way up to honor block, where prisoners live in better conditions and can, for example, do their own cooking. He observes:
No one will ever confuse me for the revolutionary George Jackson. He was a Panther. I'm a pussycat. He dug Ché, Lenin and Giap. With seven years into my prison term, I'm relatively content to be living in Prison A, and am more into chai, Lennon and the GAP.
This self-consciously jangly style, also evident in the memoir's title, can be entertaining, but it wouldn't be enough to sustain a book. Fortunately, Darcleight inhabits other registers and shows a willingness to own up to his vulnerabilities. The most affecting passages of Concrete Carnival are the loving reminiscences of the author's younger brother, whose life is now beyond Darcleight's reach and has been reduced to precious phone calls; or an account of the misery inflicted by prison noise and a hellish inmate named Chui; or descriptions of a close circle of beloved inmates, his friends Doc, Whit, and Yas, with whom he can share meals and who constitute, without exaggeration, a surrogate family.
Other sections are devoted to the painful question of how the author ended up in prison—in his case, a result of a prodigious appetite for drugs. By his account, 500 hits of ecstasy, Ritalin binges with Valium chasers, whippits of nitrous oxide, amid a backdrop of bongs and alcohol, were all part of being a party boy. But it was his discovery of heroin that proved his undoing. Heroin unmoored him and quickly reduced him to a "reptilian brain." It brought him to murder.
This destructive appetite follows him into prison, where he eventually comes to regret his efforts to procure "dompers" (a common prison drug), or to consider a fellow inmate with metastasized cancer as a promising source of pharmaceutical goodies. Doing time, Darcleight makes clear, either focuses or unhinges the mind.
Focus comes to him in several forms. First, from reading. Concrete Carnival offers a heartfelt testimony to the power of books. The notion of "escapist literature" takes on a different meaning for a lively mind confined to a jail cell, and the memoir embraces the literary and philosophical. Orwell and Nietzsche are cited along with Seneca and Viktor Frankl, as well as "prison writers" like George Jackson, Jack Henry Abbott, and Jean Genet. Women writers are curiously absent, given Darcleight's expressed longing for the feminine; so are political responses to his situation. Experiences are seen by the author as largely personal, rarely ideological.
Writing offers another means of focus. This book refers fondly to Darcleight's writing teacher, here referred to as Jameson. (This memoir, as is evident in the author's name, relies on pseudonyms.) Concrete Carnival is a positive example of the importance of prison writing workshops, beyond their psychological utility, because the author's prose leaps beyond the conventions of a classroom writing exercises and stands on its own as absorbing work.
Lastly—improbably and happily—Darcleight manages to fall in love and get married ten years into his sentence. This brings new complications and hardships to him and his wife, Lily, but it is unquestionably a source of hope and a reconnection with the world "outside." This does not make for a "happy ending"—he is in dreadful situation, as he makes clear in the last chapter when he revisits his crime and the terrible hurt he has inflicted. But it recalibrates his perceptions and the reader leaves behind a prisoner who is, in his own words, "quiveringly alive."