evicting angels

Bastards of the Reagan Era By Reginald Dwayne Betts Four Way Books ($15.95)

Reginald Dwayne Betts’ second collection of poetry, Bastards of the Reagan Era, sifts through the cultural wreckage of the drug war and the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s. Betts writes, from personal experience, for a nation of incarcerated black men, who are trying, like Odysseus, to find their way back home. He writes for his two sons, out of love. He writes for all of those who have been orphaned and widowed and otherwise bereft by systemic violence and oppression in contemporary America. He also writes for a wine-dark patch of asphalt that holds the blood of those who died too soon. This collection is an ark holding the legacy of place names that still ring out against the firmament of Betts’s prayers: Maryland Ave., Georgia Ave., Alabama Ave., Swann Rd. Betts venerates and elegizes these places because: “In streets that grieve our silence, children die,/ they fall to bullets & asthma, they fall/ into each other’s arms as mothers watch on.” In the wake of the tragic deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner, in a year where the confederate flag was finally removed from the state capitol in South Carolina, in a year when Rachel Dolezal put on blackface, and in a year when even Atticus Finch turned out to be a bigot, Bastards of the Reagan Era tackles the fraught histories of inequality and depredation that have led to the current racial climate in our nation.

The centerpiece of this collection is the long title poem, which deals with Betts’ own experiences as an inmate in the Virginia prison system. In the seventh section of the poem, subtitled “Louder Than a Bomb,” Betts writes of his days in prison:

I wrote my cousin twice. First time to say

the world was never fair, then later cause

my father said he saw his pops come off

the Seventy, a bus that runs straight through

the city, past the Mecca, Howard U

and straight down Georgia Ave. A single head

nod and they had talked more than your pops

to you or mine to me. Bastards, they call

us, buried in our father’s shadowed lives.

By retracing and underscoring these shadowed lives, Betts writes in opposition to a world where a “father’s/ name is sometimes another word/ for grave.” Betts survived prison, “the country/ where life is cheaper than anywhere else.” Betts has survived, but he has not forgotten those he left behind and those who did not make it. This book memorializes those men and honors the friends he knew growing up, whose juking through the streets during a football game was like the motion of some magnificent evicting angels, but whose movements also occurred, marionette-like, beneath the spinning sneakers of dead boys slung over telephone wires.

Betts gives eleven different poems in this collection the same title, “For the City That Nearly Broke Me.” The repetition of this title emphasizes the recursive nature of the Betts’ poetic project as a whole. Betts bears witness by continually returning to, and obsessively confronting, the cultural and historical roots of his imprisonment. He refuses to let either Len Bias or Crispus Attucks be a metaphor for his American story. One version of “For the City That Nearly Broke Me” ends:

Newports & fried chicken. There is a sadness

in the world when all the stereotypes seem true.

A calling for a block party, where men in

the street stop pretending to be Crispus Attucks,

stop thinking one more nameless man

can get named eternally after a bullet bursts

through his skin, through the tattoo that marks him.

I’m here, another body navigating what mothers’

fear. There is nothing you see while cruising

down the Ave. that explains what’s in the hooded

head that stares into your car. But he knows

the revolution starts with whatever is left

after WIC checks get cut. When I tell my brother

I’m hustling, I mean it. Damn it, I mean it.

Ultimately, Betts remains unbroken. Unbroken, he navigates what black mothers (and black fathers) fear most: that their children live in country where “so many folks” have control over their bodies. The essence of the failed American penal system today is also the essence of slavery: the dismemberment of the black family and the evisceration of black bodies. Bastards of the Reagan Era should be mandatory reading for anyone who cares about America right now. Betts hurls a cuss at all that cages and offers an alternative for his own sons, the freedom that comes from the steadfast assurance of a father’s love.

Dante Di Stefano's poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Southern California Review, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, The Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, The Bea Gonzalez Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. He works as a high school English teacher in Endicott, New York.

For more work by Dante Di Stefano, check out his page at our Online Sundries site.