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Felon

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Felon

Audio CD(Unabridged)

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Audio CD(Unabridged)
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Overview

A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity” (New York Times).

Felon tells the story of one man in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing his 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 postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life. Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a “felon.”

From “Night”

What she tells me: prison killed you my love, killed you so dead that you’re not here now, you’re never here, you’re always.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781797101675
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication date:	10/15/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 5.60(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Reginald Dwayne Betts has had his poetry published in many national literary journals and contributed an essay to Marita Golden’s anthology It’s All Love. He has been awarded the Holden Fellowship from the MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A Cave Canem fellow, his poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.

Ghazal 1

Blood History 3

The Lord Might Have Given Him Wings 4

Behind Yellow Tape 7

Losing Her 9

Whisky for Breakfast 10

For a Bail Denied 11

Triptych 13

When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving 15

In Alabama 18

A Man Drops a Coat on the Sidewalk & Almost Falls into the Arms of Another 26

City of the Moon 29

Diesel Therapy 30

If Absence Was the Source of Silence 31

Essay on Reentry 34

In Houston 36

Night 46

Essay on Reentry 48

Essay on Reentry 49

On Voting for Barack Obama in a Nat Turner T-Shirt 51

Exile 53

Parking Lot 55

Parking Lot, Too 56

Going Back 57

In California 59

Temptation of the Rope 63

Ballad of the Groundhog 65

November 5, 1980 68

& Even When There Is Something to Complain About 69

Mural for the Heart 70

Essay on Reentry 72

Confession 74

In Missouri 76

House of Unending 81

Acknowledgments 87

Notes 91

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Poured Over: Nicholas Dawidoff on The Other Side of Prospect

“When I came back, I was thinking about how to tell the story. And I wanted to meet people who in one way or number resembled the young people who I’d known as a kid and I was talking to various people, and I had some ideas. And then I got a call from a […]

…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…In prison, Betts wrote in his memoir, letters were known as "kites," because they flew up and out. The poems in Felon are kites of a different sort—bruised, sensitive, wounded missives, sent into hard wind, from a man in transition.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

"[Betts] writes masterfully, in various forms. He also illustrates the transformative power of love."

Elizabeth Lund

"[Reginald Dwayne] Betts is a hero to men on the inside.… He’s a hero to anyone who believes redemption can be had and is not some abstract idea. Felon is a testament to Betts’s talent and success, but when you read it deeply and feel it and celebrate its ideas, the layers peel back. I imagine it will leave you not only informed, but saddened, as it did me."

Poetry Foundation - John J. Lennon

"Searing.… This is a powerful work of lyric art. It is also a tour de force indictment of the carceral industrial state."

Carolyn Forché

"In visually arresting poems, Betts exposes systematic prejudices, legal disparities, and the emotional strain of raising two sons in a country accustomed to assuming the worst about Black males... Also found in the powerful realism of Betts's poems are vivid portrayals of steadfast love for the speakers family, while the theme of reentry beats throughout. The importance of Betts's collection cannot be overstated as current events shed light on ongoing injustices."

Booklist

"[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."

New York Times - Dwight Garner

"[A] lyric account of the butterfly effects of incarceration.… Felon is a magnum opus of what it means to live in American society.… This sort of collection enumerates the best that poetry can be: a tool, a song, a gesture towards empathy, an enactment of living a life that continues to baffle."

Michigan Quarterly Review - Kassy Lee

"Felon is the keenest of testaments to what it’s like to have lived behind the walls, to the crucible of having one’s humanity challenged, changed, erased, to how—for the anointed—prisons persist beyond the walls. While there are poems aplenty on the mental and physical violence of prison and our unjustice system, the collection is also a moving exploration of love—romantic and familial—and how one nurtures that love against odds that at times seem impossible. Felon is bracing, revelatory work. Read it and be transformed."

Mitchell S. Jackson

"[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 New Yorker - Dan Chiasson

"Whether delivering a one-two punch reminiscent of rap or the quiet revelations of a man brimming with wisdom, the poems in Reginald Dwayne Betts’ Felon traverse the realities of re-entering society post-incarceration."

Baltimore magazine - Lauren LaRocca

"Felon is a stunningly crafted indictment of prison’s dehumanization of Black men and their loved ones. Through his unvarnished descriptions of the path to prison and its aftermath from myriad vantage points—son, husband, father, cellmate, Yale-educated public defender—Betts does nothing to protect himself, or us, from what he has done and suffered and witnessed. His compassion and breathtaking literary gifts make it impossible for us to look away or remain complicit in mass criminalization’s status quo."

sujatha baliga

"On every page of Felon, a book unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, there’s something far more playful, resonant, and ruggedly revealing happening. Reginald Dwayne Betts animates and really embodies the minutiae of revision in this once-in-a-lifetime art object.… Betts’s artistry shows and proves a necessary breaking and blurring of the lines between wandering into yesterday, wondering into tomorrow, and wrestling with the funk of today. Betts has written the twenty-first-century book that will dictate how freedom, power, and consequence are written about until the sun says enough. It is that good."

Kiese Laymon

Felon

Felon

Audio CD(Unabridged)

Audio CD(Unabridged)

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

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Customer Reviews