Letters of Gratitude: I Am Because We Are (PB) (2024)

Iskra Books is honored to present the latest in our Red Poetry Series, the brilliant and poignant Letters of Gratitude: I Am Because We Are, by Leon Benson. Benson, who spent twenty-five years wrongfully incarcerated by the state of Indiana, only recently having been exonerated of all charges, penned these letters from behind the prison wall, in gratitude for his life, his eventual freedom, his innocence, and the support of those who loved him.

In the preface to Letters of Gratitude, educational theorist Derek R. Ford writes that we must "[r]ead how Leon moves from the (now) indisputable fact that his decades in prison ([including] one decade spent in torturous conditions) were due solely to a racist, capitalist system to the desire to build common unity with the recipients. The system he identifies and the techniques it's developed over centuries now to repress-that is to re-press, to press again, to mold-our state of mind into resignation and hatred, isn't denied or bypassed but acknowledged and transcended. It's like watching water flowing over a rock to reach the goal that we're raised not to be able to see or conceptualize: justice for all." Real justice for all begins with abolition-an abolition understood most deeply, and perhaps only, by those who have been directly wronged by the racist, capitalist system. Benson is one all abolitionists must listen to; the words of an insider-poetic, unbroken, shining from behind physical bars-allow those of us on the outside an opportunity to glimpse the profound state of gratitude and courage we all must cultivate in the struggle for a better world, for real justice.