Felon
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Felon
Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?
One of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2020 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).
Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems, canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace. In doing so, it creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person's life.
The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agilityβfrom revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume's radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates.
Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a felon.
Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?
Critics acclaim Felon for its nimble diction and powerful critique of the carceral state. Dwight Garner of the New York Times highlights its poignant portrayal of reentry into American life, while Carolyn ForchΓ© praises its energy and lyric force in addressing the criminalisation of poverty. Dan Chiasson of The New Yorker commends Bettsβs use of redacted text to reveal deeper truths and the emotional depth of poems on fatherhood. The book is recognised as a unique, revealing work of radical poetic expression.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780393652147
Publisher: WW Norton & Co
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 15 October 2019
Country: United States
Imprint: WW Norton & Co
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 15.0mm
Width: 163.0mm
Height: 218.0mm
Weight: 327g
Pages: 112
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About the Author
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father of two sons. As a poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. In 2011 Betts was awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship to Harvard Universityβs Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies. The author of the memoir, A Question of Freedom (Avery/Penguin 2009) and the collection of poetry, Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), Bettsβ work possesses a careful, complicated and often difficult-to-confront intimacy that challenges conventional ideas about crime, masculinity and redemption. In 2010 he was awarded an NAACP Image Award for A Question of Freedom, and a Soros Justice Fellowship to complete The Circumference of a Prison, a work of nonfiction exploring the criminal justice system's role in the every day lives of Americans who have not committed crimes.
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