Cover Image: Felon

Felon

Pub Date:   |   Archive Date:

Member Reviews

Part of a new movement in the African American poetry tradition. This is a powerful, culturally and morally relevant bit of excavation.

Was this review helpful?

Reginald Dwayne Betts’ poetry collection ‘Felon’ illustrates the effects of incarceration in powerful, poignant imagery. The collection’s undertaking is immense: to lay bare the full range of experiences and feelings of incarceration through its interactions with love, violence, masculinity, blackness, homelessness, umemployment, drug abuse, fatherhood, forgiveness and mercy.


Betts’ writing is beautiful and raw, caustic and honest. It shows that prison isn’t simply a passive system that you move though, it is a deliberate and active system of oppression whose effects far outlast the confines of a sentence.

Was this review helpful?

A beautiful and searing account of one man's struggle with his identity after being incarcerated. These poems explore many other themes such as justice, poverty, the criminalization of being Black and racism. This should be read alongside Just Mercy and Between The World And Me.

There are many legal documents with redactions. Betts leaves certain words and phrases readable and they form a persuasive argument about state violations of rights of the accused. He cites the eighth amendment - here specifically excessive bail. I would like to bring these "found poems" in my classroom.

Was this review helpful?

Powerful collection of poems that confront life after imprisonment in a devastating fashion. Dwayne Betts tackles several topics head on, the poems are raw, always heartfelt and don't shy away from difficult subject matter that so often gets overlooked in society as a whole.

Highly recommended.

With thanks to Netgalley and Norton for the ARC.

Was this review helpful?