Felon

Poems

9 March 2021

Territory Rights — Worldwide.

Description

“A powerful work of lyric art.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

In fierce, agile poems, Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence in traditional and newfound forms, from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion.

Reviews

"Searing... [Bett's] critique, having largely to do with the criminalization of poverty, charges these poems and flows through them, energizing their lyric force... This is a powerful work of lyric art. It is also a tour de force indictment of the carceral industrial state." — Carolyn Forché, The New York Times Book Review

"[Felon] pushes Betts's story forward, in verse that is nimble in its diction, tone and focus. The poems are about returning to everyday American life, but in an estranged and often painful way, as if blood were rushing into a long-pinned limb." — Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"[Felon] shows how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative... Betts's poems about fatherhood [are] some of the most powerful I've read... The black bars of redacted text [in the redaction poems], which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours... For Betts, the way to expression passes through such troubled silences." — Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

Also By: Reginald Dwayne Betts

Crazy as Hell: The Best Little Guide to Black History
Hoke S. Glover III, V. Efua Prince, Reginald Dwayne Betts
Paperback, 2024
By turns hilarious, candid, and heartbreaking, this powerful book takes the straitjacket off Black history.
Redaction
Reginald Dwayne Betts, Titus Kaphar
Hardback, 2023
One of Vulture’s“6 New Books You Should Read This February.”

MacArthur fellows Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kaphar present a stunning literary and artistic collaboration that confronts the...
Collected Poems
Robert Hayden, Frederick Glaysher, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Arnold Rampersad
Paperback, 2013
An exquisite body of work celebrating the centennial of one of the most important African-American poets of the twentieth century.
Collected Poems
Robert Hayden, Frederick Glaysher, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Arnold Rampersad
E Book, 2013
An exquisite body of work celebrating the centennial of one of the most important African-American poets of the twentieth century.
Crazy as Hell: The Best Little Guide to Black History
Hoke S. Glover III, V. Efua Prince, Reginald Dwayne Betts
E Book
By turns hilarious, candid, and heartbreaking, this powerful book takes the straitjacket off Black history.