Documentary Capture: Mercedes Eng's Carceral Poetics

This article focuses on documentary poetry's underdiscussed relationship to forms of surveillance and taxonomization. Mercedes Eng's first two books of poetry, Mercenary English (2013) and Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (2017), show how documentary's foundational strategies—photographing, surveying, reporting—have been instrumentalized as forms of disciplinary capture integral to the administration of the liberal state. By scrutinizing the convergence of documentary and corporeal capture, Eng composes a "carceral poetics" that demonstrates the fugitive potential of working through and underneath the disciplinary tendencies of documentary poetics. Eng's carceral poetics provides an example of "late documentary poetics," a recent phase of documentary poetry's generic development. Late documentary poets address bureaucratic processes thematically by reevaluating and recontextualizing documents from state and legal archives, but they also negotiate liberalism's infrastructure of governance by writing in a genre enmeshed in the biopolitical practices they critique.