… searing … What does not fail is the language Betts sends prismatically through his experience, rendering the entire spectrum of the prison-industrial convoluted noticeable … These poems incise into the page the wounds of prison experience … [Betts’] view is nuanced, complicated by his experience as a public defender and as a father as well as by the years inside … 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 … 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 … This is a powerful work of lyric art. It is also a tour de force indictment of the carceral industrial state.
