Reginald Dwayne Betts's New Collection Reviewed in The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani reviews poet (and Yale Law student!) Reginald Dwayne Betts’s new book, Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books 2015), at The New York Times. Betts, who has written much about his experience of prison in his memoir A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery) and a year later, the poetry collection Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), intensifies his optics here, "bear[ing] witness to [his] difficult journey from prison to law school, and the experiences of the men he got to know in prison."
It is a haunting and harrowing book that addresses, through the power of poetry, the same subjects at the heart of two important best sellers, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” and Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” — the trials of coming of age during an era in which unarmed black men and boys are dying at the hands of police officers, and millions are incarcerated by a justice system that turns people into statistics and warps their lives and hopes.
As he recounted in his powerful 2009 memoir, “A Question of Freedom,” Mr. Betts was a 16-year-old honor student in 1996 when he and a friend impulsively used a gun to rob a man and steal his car, a forest-green Grand Prix. He was sentenced as an adult and ended up serving eight years in prison.
During that time, books became a lifeline to the world and a refuge where Mr. Betts could hide from the violence and fear that defined life in prison. He read Baldwin, Walter Mosley and Kahlil Gibran. He read Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange and John Edgar Wideman in solitary. One book someone gave him would change his life: “The Black Poets,” an anthology — from slave songs through the 20th century — edited by Dudley Randall. He copied out the poems he liked, and he started writing poems himself.
“Bastards of the Reagan Era,” Mr. Betts’s second volume of verse, demonstrates his ability to use the musical power of words to convey what it is like to grow up black and marginalized, and the crushing, humiliating experience of prison. Many of these poems take place during the crack epidemic of the 1980s (a period in which, Ms. Alexander has argued, President Reagan’s war on drugs fueled the mass incarceration of black men), and Mr. Betts situates his characters’ stories within a historical echo chamber, drawing analogies between the chains used to shackle prisoners to the chains of slavery, between prisons and slave ships.
One poem talks about “the martyrs, the Malcolms,/ And Kings and Fred Hamptons,” and later of being “less than eighty miles/From where Nat Turner dug a hole and lay/ For weeks.” The narrator of another poem sees the police cracking “Rodney King’s head open before a live/ audience” on television and thinks of his brother Chris “slumped under batons & boots, under the cops’ blows.”
These poems are less concerned with the social or historical implications of their characters’s stories than with the existential dimensions of their experiences. As in his memoir, Mr. Betts focuses on the visceral effect that prison has on identity...
Read the full review at The New York Times; more about Betts can be found on his page at The Radcliffe Institute.