What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, our editorial board members and invited poets reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay. 
I won’t tell you how it ended, &
his mother won’t, either, but beside
me she stood & some things neither

of us could know, & now, all is lost;
lost is all in what came after—the kid,
& we should call him kid, call him a

child, his face smooth & without history
of a razor, he shuffled—ghostly—into
court, & let’s just call it a cauldron, &

admit his nappy head made him blacker
than whatever pistol he’d held,
whatever solitary awaited; the prosecutor’s

bald head was black or brown (but
when has brown not been akin to Black
here? to abyss?) & does it matter,

Black lives, when all he said of Black
boys was that they kill?—the child beside
his mother & his mother beside me &

I am not his father, just a public
defender, near starving, here, where the
state turns men, women, children into

numbers, seeking something more useful
than a guilty plea & this boy beside
me’s withering, on the brink of life &

broken, & it’s all possible, because the
judge spoke & the kid says
—I did it I mean I did it I mean Jesus—

someone wailed & the boy’s mother yells:
This ain’t justice. You can’t throw my son
into that fucking ocean. She meant jail.

& we was powerless to stop it.
& too damn tired to be beautiful.
from the book FELON / W. W. Norton & Company
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Color photograph of the cover of Reginald Dwayne Betts' book, Felon
What Sparks Poetry:
Jeevika Verma on Reginald Dwayne Betts' Felon

"He claims the label prison gives him—felon—and says, look, I did make mistakes, and now I am dealing with the consequences. But look, also, at how we lend ourselves to the system. How we dehumanize the incarcerated man. How every time he tries to love, we remind him of when he didn’t—'What name for / this thing that haunts, this thing we become.'"
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Informal headshot of Noʻu Revilla smiling and holding a microphone
"ʻŌiwi Poet-Professor Has 1st Book Published"

"Last September, Milkweed Editions, one of the country’s finest independent publishers, offered Revilla a book deal after she topped more than 1,600 other poets in the 2021 National Poetry Series open competition. The Waiʻehu, Maui native’s first book of poetry is based on her dissertation which explores how aloha is possible in the face of colonization and sexual violence."

via UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I NEWS
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