These poems incise into the page the wounds of prison experience: “recklessness & abandoned / justice & white terror’s ghost,” and also post-traumatic silence, leaving “Pandora’s box / untouched.” Betts subtly and deftly deploys the word “coffle” to connect life on the inside to the brutal history of slavery: “the corridors / before him are as long / as the Atlantic, each cell / a wave threatening / to coffle him,” wherein “coffle” refers to the practice of fastening slaves together by ropes or chains. But he argues, too, against imagining the prison system as the equivalent of slavery: “…that don’t make the prison / they turned into the killer’s tomb slavery. / We all standing on the wrong side of choices.” His view is nuanced, complicated by his experience as a public defender and as a father as well as by the years inside. He resists solely championing the cause of incarcerated perpetrators, preferring to include crime victims and their families among those deserving of concern: “…the victim’s mother / her Black invisible against / the subtext of her son’s coffin, / will be on the outside / of advocacy.” Betts spares no one in his critique, least of all himself.

That critique, having largely to do with the criminalization of poverty, charges these poems and flows through them, energizing their lyric force. Betts redacts court documents, reversing the censor’s role by revealing inscriptions of injustice while blacking out the dense obfuscations of legal language. In these new “found poems,” we read: “impoverished / jailed by the City / unable to pay” and “she owed the City / Officers took / away / her two children /she / too poor to pay” and “Desperate to get back / children / labored to clean / jail bars.” The agony of ruined lives radiates from the page, as does the repetitive banality of legalese: “It is the policy / of the City to jail / people / It is the policy / of the City to hold prisoners / until / extinguished / It is the policy.” A “Request for Relief” reveals a desperate appeal for due process and equal protection under the law. In the longest redacted document, “In Houston,” the poet discovers a hidden truth: “Pursuant to our federalist system the / defendants / must be / used as / an instrument of oppression.” For Betts, this is more than a clever technique. As he insists in his opening poem, “redaction is a dialect after prison.”

The lyric narrative poems speak of alcohol dependency, broken relationships, imaginary death, the acknowledgment of wrongdoing, the vulnerability of young black men. There is regret throughout, but not defeat. The mind-dissolving punishment of isolation is here too, in all its barbarity. One cannot leave this book without further awareness of our deeply unequal justice system, the abuses of money bail, and the legal sleight of hand that allows children to be sentenced as adults, despite their lack of capacity for equal culpability.

The jewel of this collection is the final crown of sonnets, “House of Unending,” an address to a past and still present incarcerated self through “each wild hour / Of lockdown, hunger time & the blackened flower” lived and measured in “The cell: a catacomb that cages and the metronome / Tracking the years that eclipse you.” It is a virtuosic reckoning with the damage endured in the aftermath, where he seems slightly to admonish himself for “Holding on to memories like they’re your archives, / Like they’re there to tell you something true / About what happened,” which is precisely what Betts has done. This is a powerful work of lyric art. It is also a tour de force indictment of the carceral industrial state.