Barrelhouse Reviews: Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Review by Jason Harris

W. W. Norton & Company / October, 2019 / 96 pp

At the start of writing this review, I spilled coffee on the book’s cover. I felt sad because even though I tried, I could not keep a thing I loved, and had only owned for a short time, in its best form.  I felt sad because I ruined the cover art that initially drew me to the book itself. The cover of Felon is an excerpt from a larger artwork by Titus Kaphar called The Jerome Project. The four heads that adorn the cover of Felon are redacted by black tar. Priscilla Frank of the Huffington Post reported in 2017 that The Jerome Project was created by assembling and tarring mug shots of men who go by the name Jerome and are incarcerated. The men’s faces are painted against gold leaf, and the height of the tar on each represents the time each man has spent in prison. “The tar also restores some privacy…that was long denied them,” Frank writes, “while simultaneously alluding to the way their reputations were ruined as a result of their incarceration.”

Reginald Dwayne Betts’s book Felon explores what it means not only to be a Black man who has been marked by labels since birth, but to be a Black man who stepped into the shadow of those labels and came out changed. In Felon, we travel through emotional ups and downs alongside a narrator who holds nothing back – not his wrongs, not his regrets, nothing. Black male American violence, in Felon, is held up to a mirror only to see, in its reflection, love and revision, both of which lend themselves to freedom for our speakers and those he shares this earth with.

It’s tender, what Betts does with language in “Ghazal,” the first poem of his book. The poem takes its title after its form – a traditional Arabic verse occupied with loss and love, written in couplets (where in the last couplet, the speaker’s name usually appears). Giving the title of a poem to its form is a voice speaking back to the speaker, whispering, call me by name. Felon. Ghazal. Lover. Beloved. The repeated word in the poem is not the name of a lover, but “prison.”

The second couplet of the poem reads:

Titus Kaphar painted my portrait, then dipped it in black tar.
He knows redaction is a dialect after prison.

Our speaker, in this poem that feels like a cage, with its constant circling back to its beginning, with its (in)ability to escape its refrain – after prison – situates the reader in a theme that drums throughout the pages of Felon: revision. These two lines carry, with one hand, the weight of what it means to be alive at this moment in history amongst the noise. All the names of Black people being chanted in streets, the phones pinging with headlines mentioning the death of once-in-a-lifetime athletes, of potential world war, of another name being quietly swallowed into history.  Betts reminds us that revision is possible, that revision exists not in isolation, but against the air that our dark bodies push against at night, hoping to find light where no light wants to show itself. But light Betts’s narrator finds in the last couplet of the ghazal, called the maqtaa:

You have come so far, Beloved, & for what, another song?
Then sing. Shahid you’re loved, not shipwrecked, after prison.

The stakes of revision, in Felon, are transformed. Revision becomes not just a practice of editing but redaction; revision becomes the tool with which we engage with history – both intimate and political.

I started writing the first draft of this book review one evening at a coffee shop called Civilization on February 12, 2020 in northeast Ohio. A few days later, I would be on a plane to Miami, Florida, where I would drink bad hotel coffee and walk along South Beach and think about possible ways to enter this project. I had gathered ideas to frame the review around the notion that Felon is a collection of love poems, but that framing would be derailed. After spending three nights in Miami, I returned to my rented home in Ohio where life – as I knew it to be lived, as many of us knew it to be lived – would change drastically in a matter of weeks. By early March, a novel coronavirus would reveal how dysfunctional the American healthcare system is. State-sanctioned violence in the United States of America would, as it has decade after decade after decade, lead people out of their homes to protest police brutality, to protest the murder of Black people fueled by white supremacists.

I sit here today, looking at my worn copy of Felon, and feel sad, again. Not for the coffee-stained cover – a sadness intimate to me – but because less than four months ago, things were different: Ahmaud Arbery was still alive; Breonna Taylor was still alive; George Floyd was still alive. Life was not yet shipwrecked.

Felon not only reiterates what happens after a label has been placed on us, but also restores the reputation of self, of the humanity that is lost when we are labeled something inhumane. For how many of us have longed for some wrong done unto us, done unto others, or some violence enacted upon us, or upon others, to stop its echoing?

Jason Harris is an educator, writer, and Watering Hole Fellow. He is the 2020-2021 Barbara Smith Writer-in-Residence. Jason's work has appeared in Wildness Journal, Winter Tangerine, Foundry Journal, The Bind, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. His first full-length collection of poems is forthcoming from Twelve Arts Press. His Twitter handle is @j_harriswrites.