Description

---

One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2025

One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025



Doggerel is a revelatory meditation on Blackness, masculinity, and vulnerability from one of poetry’s boldest voices.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American life. In Doggerel, Betts examines this subject through a more prosaic—but equally rich—lens: dogs. He reminds us that, as our lives are broken and put back together, the only witness often barks instead of talks. In these poems, which touch on companionship in its many forms, Betts seamlessly and skillfully deploys the pantoum, ghazal, and canzone, in conversation with artists such as Freddie Gibbs and Lil Wayne.

Simultaneously philosophical and playful, Doggerel is a meditation on family, falling in love, friendship, and those who accompany us on our walk through life. Balancing political critique with personal experience, Betts once again shows us “how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)—and, in doing so, reveals the world anew.

“. . . every story becomes a multiplication,

If the naming is filled less with names than

With the best parts, the barking & everything

Else, because who among us hasn’t been

As mangy as a rescue, even on our best

Days, desiring mostly to be loved.”

—from “Rings”

About the Author

---

Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of three books of poetry, including the best-selling Felon. He is a poet, lawyer, and the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his dog.

Praise For…

---

[Doggerel] offers satisfyingly rich meditations on companionship, loss, and more.
— New York Times Book Review

Doggerel is a triumph of surprising moments and passionate reflections.
— Michael Ruzicka - Booklist

Political critique and personal reflection inform these poems on the many forms of companionship, drawing on traditional forms (pantoum, ghazal, and canzone) and alluding to rappers including Freddie Gibbs and Lil Wayne.
— Publishers Weekly

Doggerel is an apt name for this lovely collection, with the canine-hidden-in-plain-sight in its title and coursing through so many of the poems. Betts manages to capture essences—of memory, of hope or loss, of oft-overlooked everydayness—in a way that feels surprising and familiar at once.
— Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know