... searing ... What does not fail is the language Betts sends prismatically through his experience, rendering the entire spectrum of the prison-industrial complex visible ... These poems incise into the page the wounds of prison experience ... [Betts'] view is nuanced, complicated by his experience as a public defender and as a father as well as by the years inside ... Betts spares no one in his critique, least of all himself ... That critique, having largely to do with the criminalization of poverty, charges these poems and flows through them, energizing their lyric force ... One cannot leave this book without further awareness of our deeply unequal justice system, the abuses of money bail, and the legal sleight of hand that allows children to be sentenced as adults, despite their lack of capacity for equal culpability ... This is a powerful work of lyric art. It is also a tour de force indictment of the carceral industrial state.
... shows how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative ... Betts’s poems about fatherhood [are] some of the most powerful I’ve read ... The black bars of redacted text, which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours... Autobiography functions in this book in fascinating, risky ways ... For Betts, the way to expression passes through such troubled silences.
The poems vividly chronicle how the dehumanizing experience of incarceration doesn’t end with a clean slate but with another long struggle on the outside, one that often includes homelessness, drug abuse and underemployment ... Betts writes masterfully, in various forms. He also illustrates the transformative power of love.
... pushes Betts’s story forward, in verse that is nimble in its diction, tone and focus. The poems are about returning to everyday American life, but in an estranged and often painful way, as if blood were rushing into a long-pinned limb ... In prison, Betts wrote in his memoir, letters were known as 'kites,' because they flew up and out. The poems in Felon are kites of a different sort — bruised, sensitive, wounded missives, sent into hard wind, from a man in transition.
In visually arresting poems, Betts exposes systematic prejudices, legal disparities, and the emotional strain of raising two sons in a country accustomed to assuming the worst about Black males ... Also found in the powerful realism of Betts’ poems are vivid portrayals of steadfast love for the speaker’s family, while the theme of reentry beats throughout. The importance of Betts’ collection cannot be overstated as current events shed light on ongoing injustices.
