Doggerel

Based on an extensive study of juxtaposition, Doggerel is a revelatory meditation on Blackness, masculinity, and vulnerability from one of poetry’s boldest voices.

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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.