Felon Poems

Author : Reginald Dwayne Betts
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393652157
Total Pages : 112 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Felon: Poems written by Reginald Dwayne Betts and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry Finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys "the visceral effect that prison has on identity" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life. The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility—from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates. Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a "felon."

Author : Kazim Ali
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780819569936
Total Pages : 112 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bright Felon written by Kazim Ali and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking, transgenre work—part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past—is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally “autobiography” because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, and Etel Adnan’s In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader’s companion is available at http://brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

Author : Dwayne Betts
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101133368
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Question of Freedom written by Dwayne Betts and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-08-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique prison narrative that testifies to the power of books to transform a young man's life At the age of sixteen, R. Dwayne Betts-a good student from a lower- middle-class family-carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. In Virginia, carjacking is a "certifiable" offense, meaning that Betts would be treated as an adult under state law. A bright young kid, he served his nine-year sentence as part of the adult population in some of the worst prisons in the state. A Question of Freedom chronicles Betts's years in prison, reflecting back on his crime and looking ahead to how his experiences and the books he discovered while incarcerated would define him. Utterly alone, Betts confronts profound questions about violence, freedom, crime, race, and the justice system. Confined by cinder-block walls and barbed wire, he discovers the power of language through books, poetry, and his own pen. Above all, A Question of Freedom is about a quest for identity-one that guarantees Betts's survival in a hostile environment and that incorporates an understanding of how his own past led to the moment of his crime.

Author : Reginald Dwayne Betts
Publisher : Alice James Books
ISBN 13 : 1948579928
Total Pages : 69 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shahid Reads His Own Palm written by Reginald Dwayne Betts and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gripping and terrifying, eloquent and heartwrenching, this debut collection delves into hellish territory: prison life. Soulful poems somberly capture time-bending experiences and the survivalist mentality needed to live a contradiction, confronting both daily torment and one's illogical fear of freedom.

Author : Randall Horton
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813179904
Total Pages : 77 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book {#289-128} written by Randall Horton and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Forgive state poet #289-128 / for not scribbling illusions / of trickery as if timeless hell / could be captured by stanzas / alliteration or slant rhyme," remarks the speaker, Maryland Department of Corrections prisoner {#289-128}, early in this haunting collection. Three sections—{#289-128} Property of the State, {#289-128} Poet-in-Residence (Cell 23), and {#289-128} Poet in New York—frame the countless ways in which the narrator's body and life are socially and legally rendered by the state even as the act of poetry helps him reclaim an identity during imprisonment. These poems address the prison industrial complex, the carceral state, the criminal justice system, racism, violence, love, resilience, hope, and despair while exploring the idea of freedom in a cell. In the tradition of Dennis Brutus's Letters to Martha, Wole Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt, and Etheridge Knight's The Essential Etheridge Knight, {#289-128} challenges the language of incarceration—especially the ways in which it reinforces stigmas and stereotypes. Though {#289-128} refuses to be defined as a felon, this collection viscerally details the dehumanizing effects of prison, which linger long after release. It also illuminates the ways in which we all are relegated to cells or boundaries, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.

Author : Solmaz Sharif
Publisher : Graywolf Press
ISBN 13 : 1644451697
Total Pages : 97 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Customs written by Solmaz Sharif and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry Winner of the 2023 Northern California Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist for the 2022 L.A. Times Book Prize for Poetry Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through. While Sharif critiques the culture of performed social skills and poetry itself—its foreclosures, affects, successes—she begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom. Customs is a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time.

Author : Kahlil Gibran
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 142 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Prophet written by Kahlil Gibran and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering inspiration to all, one man's philosophy of life and truth, considered one of the classics of our time.

Author : Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
ISBN 13 : 1680032291
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Her Read written by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Her Read: A Graphic Poem is a hybrid text at once poetry and visual art. In the tradition of reusing canvases, Steinorth takes a seminal text, The Meaning of Art by Herbert Read and with the liberal use of correction fluid, scalpel and embroidery floss, transforms the book from art criticism into feminist verse. Though the maternal body appears with frequency in Read’s illustrated text which spans from prehistory to the modern age, he includes zero female artists. Her Read: A Graphic Poem is an excavation of buried voices, a reclamation of bodies framed in gilt and an homage to those whose arts remain unsung.

Author : Dudley Randall
Publisher : Bantam
ISBN 13 : 0553275631
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Black Poets written by Dudley Randall and published by Bantam. This book was released on 1985-04-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The claim of The Black Poets to being... an anthology is that it presents the full range of Black-American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is the root and inspiration of later, literary poetry. Not only does this book present the full range of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooks is represented not only by poems on racial and domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of superb love lyrics. Tuming away from White models and retuming to their roots has freed Black poets to create a new poetry. This book records their progress."--from the Introduction by Dudley Randall

Author : Kazim Ali
Publisher : Alice James Books
ISBN 13 : 1948579685
Total Pages : 64 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Voice of Sheila Chandra written by Kazim Ali and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Titled for the influential singer left almost voiceless by a terrible syndrome, the poems bring sweet melodies and rhythms as the voices blend and become multitudinous. There’s an honoring of not only survival, but of persistence, as this part research-based, pensive collection contemplates what it takes to move forward when the unimaginable holds you back.