NONFICTION

Bastards of the Reagan Era

by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Four Ways. (Stahlecker Selections.) 2015. 84p. ISBN 9781935536659. pap. $15.95. POETRY
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Half the poems in this arresting, tough-minded collection from Beatrice Hawley Award winner Betts (Shahid Reads His Own Palm) are titled "For the City That Nearly Broke Me," and the elegiac tone extends to all black men in harsh America: "Many gone to grave: men awed/ by blood, lost in the black/ of all that is awful:/ think crack and aluminum." We think a lot about drugs and guns, street fights and prison and handcuffs as Betts recalls the "black cauldron" of the Eighties and his own burdened life. As he says in the title poem, "I graduated high school numb,/ Already caged with a dead man rattling 'bout my head," and the rattling is heard throughout.
VERDICT An extraordinary portrait; read it and weep.
Reviewed by Barbara Hoffert , Nov 15, 2015
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