Doggerel
Regular price
€25.99
A01=Reginald Dwayne Betts
african american poetry
Author_Reginald Dwayne Betts
black poetry
Category=DC
Category=DS
Category=QR
Category=WN
dog owners
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
family
home
incarceration
poems about dogs
poems about life
poems about longing
poems about memory
poems about pets
prison
religious poetry
Product details
- ISBN 9781324089254
- Weight: 268g
- Dimensions: 163 x 218mm
- Publication Date: 04 Mar 2025
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Reginald 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.
Simultaneously 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.
“. . . every story becomes a multiplication,
If the naming is filled less with names than
With the best parts, the barking & everything
Else, because who among us hasn’t been
As mangy as a rescue, even on our best
Days, desiring mostly to be loved.”
—from “Rings”
Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of three books of poetry, including the best-selling Felon. He is a poet, lawyer, and the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his dog.
