Felon
Poems
9 March 2021
Description
“A powerful work of lyric art.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
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 
Redaction
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
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
E Book, 2013
An exquisite body of work celebrating the centennial of one of the most important African-American poets of the twentieth century.
