paper • 72 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-935536-65-9
Watch a Special Video from the Author
Read a Review of Bastards of the Reagan Era in Muzzle Magazine
Read a Review of Bastards of the Reagan Era in the Kenyon Review
Bastards of the Reagan Era by Reginald Dwayne Betts is the winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award in Poetry, the 2015 INDIEFAB Book of the Year for Poetry, a winner of the National Council on Crime & Delinquency’s (NCCD) 2016 Media for a Just Society Award, the 2016 Housatonic Book Award, Bronze Winner of a Human Relations Indie Book Award, was shortlisted for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award, made Library Journal’s “Best Books 2015: Poetry” list, and was a finalist for both the 2016 Firecracker Award in Poetry and the 2016 Wheatley Book Award in Poetry.
Bastards of the Reagan Era
Reginald Dwayne Betts
The poet Raymond Patterson once asked “But who can conceive / Of cities lost in a blackman?” That’s what these poems are about: what does it mean to be nearly broken by something you love? Bastards of the Reagan Era is a challenge, a confrontation of the hard realities that frame America. These poems question an incongruous America: “A black boy says sorbet / is one thing—a black boy says get the fuck out the car is quite another.” Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear “the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world.”
“For the City That Nearly Broke Me”, from Bastards of the Reagan Era:
Stress this: the lit end
of anything will
burn you. & that is just
just a slick way of
saying: running will
never save you. This
man's first son caved, fell
to the pressure, to
the barrel's indent
against his temple.
A body given
back to asphalt.
Stress this: we never
gave a fuck, not 'bout
Malik or how the
bullet didn't split
the air, but split those
edged-up, precise hairs
of his caesar, to save
the man the burden
of years fearing death.