Bøker av Reginald Dwayne Betts

Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American masculinity. 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 revelatory and faithful meditation on Blackness, masculinity, 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, New Yorker)-and, in doing so, reveals the world anew.

Throughout their award-winning careers, visual artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar and poet, memoirist, and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts have shed light on the violences of incarceration and the underexplored contradictions of American history. In Redaction, they unite their different mediums to expose the ways the legal system exploits and erases the poor and incarcerated from public consciousness.First exhibited at MoMA PS1, the fifty "Redaction" prints layer Kaphar's etched portraits of incarcerated individuals with Betts's poetry, which uses the legal strategy of redaction to craft verse out of legal documents. Three prints are broken apart into their distinct layers, illuminating how the pair manipulated traditional engraving, printing, poetic, and redaction processes to reveal what is often concealed. This beautifully designed volume also includes additional artwork, poetry, and an introduction by MoMA associate director Sarah Suzuki. The result is an astonishing, powerful exploration of history, incarceration, and race in America.

Winner of the 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry Finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys "the visceral effect that prison has on identity" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times).