In his essay published by The Poetry Foundation, John J. Lennon offers his thoughts on Reginald Dwayne Betts’s collection of poems, Felon. After reading John’s piece Betts tweeted, “I’m certain no one has written anything about my writing and life that as hit me so hard in the gut.”
EXCERPT
I’m reading Felon (W.W. Norton, 2019), Reginald Dwayne Betts’s newest collection of poems, trying to remember what someone once told me about how to read poetry: deeply, feeling it, celebrating its ideas. A PA blares, inmates yell, gates slam—and the din snaps me out of my head and back into my humid, cramped cell at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
Felon is a testament to Betts’s years in prison — and after. He did time in Virginia for a carjacking; he was sentenced in 1997 and released almost nine years later. He then went to college, earned an MFA before age 30, and became a poet. Underemployed, he forged on, received fellowships, wrote a memoir and two acclaimed books of poems, and then was accepted to Yale Law and became a lawyer in Connecticut. It’s the moments between these successes — living as a felon, remembering life as a convict — that shape the poetry in his new book.