Doggerel: Poems - Reginald Dwayne Betts

\nReginald 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.\n \nSimultaneously 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.\n \n. . . every story becomes a multiplication, \n \nIf the naming is filled less with names than\n \nWith the best parts, the barking & everything\n \nElse, because who among us hasn't been\n \nAs mangy as a rescue, even on our best\n \nDays, desiring mostly to be loved.\n \n--from Rings\n