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

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.

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.