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Bastards of the Reagan Era
Bastards of the Reagan Era is a challenge, confronting realities that frame an America often made invisible. 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." We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.
68 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2015
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816 people want to read
About the author
Reginald Dwayne Betts
24 books234 followersReginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, essayist, and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice. He writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Felon, Bastards of the Reagan Era, and Shahid Reads His Own Palm, as well as a memoir, A Question of Freedom. A graduate of Yale Law School, he lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife and their two sons.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews
November 1, 2018
Up there with the best books of poetry I've read in the last decade. Betts has developed a powerful voice that combines a certain sort of street realism with a touch for images that move beneath the surface to unlock invisible energies. As the title suggests, this volume is concerned primarily with what happened to inner cities, primarily black, during the 1980s. It's grim and unremitting: there are seven or eight poems that bear the same title, "For the City that Nearly Broke Me." Another's "The Invention of Crack." The highlight, though, is the suite "Bastards of the Reagan Era" which is structured as a set of responses to key tracks on Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions CD. Betts is clear on the sources of the malaise in a public policy alternating between malicious neglect and open attack, but he's at least as much concerned with African American complicity, the ways that individuals used the political situation to abdicate responsibility. I'm about half tempted to send a copy to Obama (not that I have an address other than the White House) when he leaves office; I think Betts is saying a good part of what Obama wants to, but can't.
A sample from Night of the Living Baseheads:
The hustle courted us. And we were down.
It'll take you to ruin moms would say,
As if disaster wasn't that damned place:
Those afternoons and all their sirens blare.
Maybe she knew that soon five sweet and love
Sized packs of crack would mean a flat
Nickel in a kaleidoscope of cells,
A mandatory minimum of years
Where home becomes God's nightmare. Our curse.
A sample from Night of the Living Baseheads:
The hustle courted us. And we were down.
It'll take you to ruin moms would say,
As if disaster wasn't that damned place:
Those afternoons and all their sirens blare.
Maybe she knew that soon five sweet and love
Sized packs of crack would mean a flat
Nickel in a kaleidoscope of cells,
A mandatory minimum of years
Where home becomes God's nightmare. Our curse.
August 22, 2022
Moral Hazard: A condition in which the volume, density and complexity of evil in our environment--of which we are always complicit--is so pervasive and overwhelming that we lose our ability to critically engage it, and thus surmount it.
We are a nation ever deepening our commitment to ignoring, obfuscating, downplaying and justifying the mistakes, injustices and oppressions of our past and present. There is a constant need to be optimistic. To believe that the American project is essentially good, or else our world will devolve into blood & chaos. But our world already IS blood & chaos, always has been.
In this collection, Reginald Dwayne Betts addresses the era that birthed him. The Reagan 80s of drug proliferation and the attendant expansion and modernization of the carceral state that deepened the criminalization of black bodies. He has no time or sympathy to easy fantasies. The failings that forged him were both structural and personal. There are no bogeymen, no pat invocations of coded conspiracy. Just men, broken by want & need & greed, by despair & lust from being young and caged.
On the back of the book, in one of several incisive blurbs, Mark Osler suggests that this collection's vitality lies in its provision of an expanded imaginative and linguistic vocabulary for the state of contemporary black America, particularly its relationship to incarceration and crime. This is just right and no small feat. Betts has built out of his own hard passage a bridge from what is to what could be.
Literature, and poetry especially, in their attention to detail, form, tradition, and possibility, should always be pressing our minds and spirits beyond their accepted bounds. This ode to broken, battered stock does so in spades. One of the most compelling ways it does so is in its acute attention to names--what they illuminate and hide. How we identify ourselves and the world decides to brand us. The book begins with a mythology of naming for Betts's sons, and in this acknowledgment and wonder, light is cast. To look with clear eyes at our shared past is not a demarcation of limit but the reckoning that brings the future, any future, into being.
We are a nation ever deepening our commitment to ignoring, obfuscating, downplaying and justifying the mistakes, injustices and oppressions of our past and present. There is a constant need to be optimistic. To believe that the American project is essentially good, or else our world will devolve into blood & chaos. But our world already IS blood & chaos, always has been.
In this collection, Reginald Dwayne Betts addresses the era that birthed him. The Reagan 80s of drug proliferation and the attendant expansion and modernization of the carceral state that deepened the criminalization of black bodies. He has no time or sympathy to easy fantasies. The failings that forged him were both structural and personal. There are no bogeymen, no pat invocations of coded conspiracy. Just men, broken by want & need & greed, by despair & lust from being young and caged.
On the back of the book, in one of several incisive blurbs, Mark Osler suggests that this collection's vitality lies in its provision of an expanded imaginative and linguistic vocabulary for the state of contemporary black America, particularly its relationship to incarceration and crime. This is just right and no small feat. Betts has built out of his own hard passage a bridge from what is to what could be.
Literature, and poetry especially, in their attention to detail, form, tradition, and possibility, should always be pressing our minds and spirits beyond their accepted bounds. This ode to broken, battered stock does so in spades. One of the most compelling ways it does so is in its acute attention to names--what they illuminate and hide. How we identify ourselves and the world decides to brand us. The book begins with a mythology of naming for Betts's sons, and in this acknowledgment and wonder, light is cast. To look with clear eyes at our shared past is not a demarcation of limit but the reckoning that brings the future, any future, into being.
December 19, 2015
Autobiographical poetry about the cold, hard realities of growing up Black during a specific time in American history.
Betts, whose life is a prison-to-law school success story, pulls no punches about what the 80s and 90s were like for young black men, especially in the context of crack cocaine and increasingly more draconian New Jim Crow drug laws. The volume begins, however, with two joyful, passionate poems from Betts to--and about--his sons, as if to say that their life experiences, though difficult, will take place in a very different context with more opportunities mixed in with the same old dangers. They will also be raised with care and concern, the likes of which he often did not get, but has somehow learned to give.
Gritty realism carries the day here, wrapped in word choice and references--mainly to 80s and 90s rap lyrics--that will resonate most keenly with those who lived through the era and had similar experiences. The poems are like rock sculptures: tall, towering, inflexible, jagged, with a terrible majesty. There are scenes from prison here, tales from the street, memories of friends who lost the game, and, over and over, fathers and sons. Many of the poems share the same title: "For the City That Nearly Broke Me": many different ways of looking at the Black inner city experience.
Betts's work is a testament to an era technically gone by, but whose themes and events still have consequences for Black America today. For white readers like myself, it's a history lesson that fills in the gaps of what we never learned. For readers of color, it's a testament to a lived experience that, thankfully, is finally starting to take its rightful place in literature and the arts.
Betts, whose life is a prison-to-law school success story, pulls no punches about what the 80s and 90s were like for young black men, especially in the context of crack cocaine and increasingly more draconian New Jim Crow drug laws. The volume begins, however, with two joyful, passionate poems from Betts to--and about--his sons, as if to say that their life experiences, though difficult, will take place in a very different context with more opportunities mixed in with the same old dangers. They will also be raised with care and concern, the likes of which he often did not get, but has somehow learned to give.
Gritty realism carries the day here, wrapped in word choice and references--mainly to 80s and 90s rap lyrics--that will resonate most keenly with those who lived through the era and had similar experiences. The poems are like rock sculptures: tall, towering, inflexible, jagged, with a terrible majesty. There are scenes from prison here, tales from the street, memories of friends who lost the game, and, over and over, fathers and sons. Many of the poems share the same title: "For the City That Nearly Broke Me": many different ways of looking at the Black inner city experience.
Betts's work is a testament to an era technically gone by, but whose themes and events still have consequences for Black America today. For white readers like myself, it's a history lesson that fills in the gaps of what we never learned. For readers of color, it's a testament to a lived experience that, thankfully, is finally starting to take its rightful place in literature and the arts.
March 22, 2016
Drugs, violence and incarceration during a period of fear and chaos told in a brutal and haunting poetic voice. Notable Book List Winner 2016 for Poetry. For a complete list of winners, please visit http://www.ala.org/rusa/awards/notabl....
October 19, 2015
In a word, devastating.
Also, gorgeous, graceful, stunning, poignant, powerful, gripping, heartbreaking, impressive...
Also, gorgeous, graceful, stunning, poignant, powerful, gripping, heartbreaking, impressive...
May 3, 2025
A beautiful and haunting account of the new Jim Crow.
February 28, 2019
What a beautiful, painful, gorgeous book.
May 19, 2016
I remember this era well. It was a time of distracting, empty platitudes and catch-phrases, “It’s morning in America” and “Just say no” as the deficit skyrocketed, unemployment reached double digits, slums were overrun by drugs, taxes raised on the middle class, simplemindedness posing as policy and vision and too many bystanders dumbly smiling. These poems capture the underside of that era of willful obliviousness. It was government by the few, for the few, and nobody wanted to acknowledge “that the system’s a glass house falling on only/a few heads.” And, as Betts acknowledges, “There is this sadness/in the world when all the stereotypes seem true.” Blood, bars, burners, asphalt, doomed children, all repeated like blows from a cop’s baton. We need poems like this. We need the full story.
April 14, 2016
I was young during the Reagan Era but I witnessed it's consequences in the years to come. Nancy was lecturing me and my friends to Just Say No. We grew up with young uncles and older brothers slinging rocks with a braggadocios rap soundtrack. Those of us who weren't about that life chose to listen to P.E and B.D.P. while staying home off the block. The streets were really bad during those years but not all bad I recall some great Block parties. His lines in this book are a testament to that time, telling the truth and exposing the fear and pain that many (not all) felt because of political chicanery
February 22, 2016
One day, when racism is a faint notion from faraway, we will have a book like this to describe the societal forces that send a massive amount of people of color into a life of crime and eventual incarceration. This book gives one pause as its author had all the earmarks of an outstanding student when one crime delivered him into the "justice" system. It requires a poet to bring the despair of such a sentence to life, and to protest the forces that wasted his youth. This is as much a historical document as it is fine poetry.
December 30, 2015
The poems in this book are beautiful, opening up Dwayne's world in a power and visceral way. Dwayne is the one who has mastered the art of using words to paint a picture of reality, but suffice to say that this is an extraordinary work that helps give voice to the challenges associated with systemic racism, mass incarceration, and on a personal level, brokenness and perhaps a seed of redemption.
December 13, 2015
A harrowing, brutal and unflinching look at African Americans struggles during the late 80s, bleeding into the early 1990s by a master poet. I heard about Mr. Betts' work on NPR with Terry Gross and I was impressed and moved by his command of tone and heartbreak as he read excerpts of this really slim and terrifying collection of what it means to be black in America.
December 31, 2015
It's a wonder when a book can be both devastating and gorgeous, when it can fuel your compassion and stir the embers of anger. This book is a marvel and it's monumentally important to our historical moment.
Read
March 8, 2016This collection, which made ALA's 2016 Best List, is brutal and challenging. It pairs well with a recent reading of Between the World and Me, and it's worthwhile in a makes-your-heart-hurt (not so much a makes-your-heart-sing) kind of way. -Sarah
November 20, 2015
"History is written on the back of the horse broken by the world."
December 29, 2015
Breathtaking at many points.
August 13, 2015
An important book at a pivotal time.
April 18, 2016
heavy 80's
August 19, 2017
Reginald Dwayne Betts reminds readers of Bastards of the Reagan Era that the era it describes has not ended yet, and won't until we read and reread these poems on our way to doing something, anything that breaks this cycle of oppression, suffering, and loss. His experience is not my experience but these poems bring me back to the 1980s and those experiences that were all around me no matter how far I retreated into my shell that I have taken too many decades to start dismantling so that I can reckon with what's wrong with this nation.
Many of these poems end with observations that take my breath away, sometimes not pleasantly. The image of boys "controlled by the spinning sneaker / strings of the dead boys above them" in Elegy With a RIP Shirt Turning Into the Wind" on page 37 is concrete and haunting. "Where pretty has failed everyone, even / cherubim, out to leave us to this world" in "For the City That Nearly Broke Me" on page 39 resonates as criticism of an abstraction that continues to hold too much power over us. By "The Invention of Crack" on page 50, Betts' poems had prepared me to trust the language and the jargon, history, and critique that lists and repeats and makes personal the politics of oppression and the purgatories and hells that arise and are maintained by it.
Betts uses vivid sensory detail in his poems about prison experience that left me overwhelmed; I'm not going to say I know what it's like, but this brush with prison life/purgatory/hell through these poems leaves me dejected but angry and wanting to learn more.
As public displays of hate destroy naive and purposely ignorant blinders many of us have had on forever, I've begun to recognize that a reckoning with white supremacy and the history of the United States is long, long overdue. The persona narrator in these poems is not necessarily or only angry. Betts' poems open readers' eyes to places and experiences they might otherwise shrink away from, and they do this with sadness and elegy that should motivate us to make this world so much better than we have made it so far, before we condemn more generations to this cycle of betrayal, suffering, and revelation that has not ended yet.
Many of these poems end with observations that take my breath away, sometimes not pleasantly. The image of boys "controlled by the spinning sneaker / strings of the dead boys above them" in Elegy With a RIP Shirt Turning Into the Wind" on page 37 is concrete and haunting. "Where pretty has failed everyone, even / cherubim, out to leave us to this world" in "For the City That Nearly Broke Me" on page 39 resonates as criticism of an abstraction that continues to hold too much power over us. By "The Invention of Crack" on page 50, Betts' poems had prepared me to trust the language and the jargon, history, and critique that lists and repeats and makes personal the politics of oppression and the purgatories and hells that arise and are maintained by it.
Betts uses vivid sensory detail in his poems about prison experience that left me overwhelmed; I'm not going to say I know what it's like, but this brush with prison life/purgatory/hell through these poems leaves me dejected but angry and wanting to learn more.
As public displays of hate destroy naive and purposely ignorant blinders many of us have had on forever, I've begun to recognize that a reckoning with white supremacy and the history of the United States is long, long overdue. The persona narrator in these poems is not necessarily or only angry. Betts' poems open readers' eyes to places and experiences they might otherwise shrink away from, and they do this with sadness and elegy that should motivate us to make this world so much better than we have made it so far, before we condemn more generations to this cycle of betrayal, suffering, and revelation that has not ended yet.
October 6, 2017
I'm actually glad that there's a lot in this book of poetry that I don't understand completely. Betts' poetry is not easy, it's not pleasant, but it voices something deep and real about our nation and about how we view each other. Can we come to social justice, to racial justice, to criminal justice? Is there a solution? Betts' fine collection ends with a recognition, but perhaps some hope: "I know there is still a strip, a place that he believes is the world: Swann Rd., where he can inhale & be free. Sometimes his cuffs are on my wrists & I embrace the way they cut, as if I am the one domesticated, a broken horse."
June 1, 2019
This poetry collection is amazing. Reginald's poems are heartwrenching and intelligent as fuck; he knows so much about politics, the prison industrial complex, and drug policy, and it shapes his commentary into pillars of knowledge and emotion. I ache for everything that has been lost in the aftermath of Reagan's crack conspiracy, and I ache for those being punished by systems (both legal and prison) that never cared about them beyond turning a profit. This book is a must-read for anyone who enjoys political poetry.
August 10, 2018
In an America ravaged by oppression, police brutality, injustice, violence, poverty, racism, and inescapable circumstances, this collection of poetry is just as relevant now as the subject matter. While these poems were written about the War on Drugs, it's evident that everything in this book is still happening every day and it's time to wake up.
The images and feelings in these poems are convicting and accusatory, but a call to action that everyone needs to hear.
The images and feelings in these poems are convicting and accusatory, but a call to action that everyone needs to hear.
August 13, 2018
These are beautiful poems, especially the first few. I was immediately pulled in, and the passion and rhythm of those early poems were well sustained. I really like short collections with clear identities like this one. It reads like a moment, but one that reaches out to touch all other moments. These are beautiful poems.
August 27, 2020
“‘History is written / on the back of the horse’ broken / by the world.” Poems that operate in traditions both epic & lyric, wrestling with and investigating masculinity, justice, love, & the history we live out daily (and the impacts, large and small, of that history, especially on the lives of every day people).
April 8, 2021
This collection hurt my heart and my white girl brain--I have a lot of things to learn about the crack epidemic, prisons, what bad/racist policies were ushered in by the Reagan era, and really everything. The titular poem was so good, any the majority of the other ones also were amazing. I would absolutely recommend this collection.
December 21, 2016
I'm getting into poetry and I've been interested in this collection since I heard Betts on On Point with Tom Ashbrook. A riveting and hard look at life in the 1980s, with special focus on race, the crack epidemic, and prison. Deserves another read after I'm more experienced in poetry.
April 2, 2018
Strong powerful body of work.
July 3, 2019
beautiful
November 7, 2019
Read it aloud for maximum effect.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews