Doggerel: Poems - Hardcover

by Reginald Dwayne Betts (Author)

Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American life. In Doggerel, Betts examines this subject through a more prosaic--but equally rich--lens: dogs. He reminds us that, as our lives are broken and put back together, the only witness often barks instead of talks. In these poems, which touch on companionship in its many forms, Betts seamlessly and skillfully deploys the pantoum, ghazal, and canzone, in conversation with artists such as Freddie Gibbs and Lil Wayne.

Simultaneously philosophical and playful, Doggerel is a meditation on family, falling in love, friendship, and those who accompany us on our walk through life. Balancing political critique with personal experience, Betts once again shows us "how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative" (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)--and, in doing so, reveals the world anew.

". . . every story becomes a multiplication,

If the naming is filled less with names than

With the best parts, the barking & everything

Else, because who among us hasn't been

As mangy as a rescue, even on our best

Days, desiring mostly to be loved."

--from "Rings"

Back Jacket

Praise for Reginald Dwayne Betts

"[Reginald Dwayne Betts] writes masterfully, in various forms. He also illustrates the transformative power of love."
-- Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post

"Searing. . . . This is a powerful work of lyric art. It is also a tour de force indictment of the carceral industrial state."
-- ECarolyn Forch?, New York Times Book Review

"[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."
-- John J. Lennon, Poetry Foundation

"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, author of Heavy: An American Memoir