Poet, critic, and professor Stephanie Burt reviewed Doggerel by Reginald Dwayne Betts (CRF 2023) in The New York Times Book Review on April 23, 2025 praising it as “poetry that leans into calm and joy amid life’s chaos.”
Burt writes, “Tender figures of fatherhood, raising boys; idyllic walks and a “bike ride” through “Italian countryside”; the poet’s Jack Russell (called Taylor or Tay-Tay); and other “small/Dogs who appreciate the chance silence/Gives” unite to make Betts’s fourth book of poems, Doggerel, a welcome respite from almost every other serious book of poems you could read this year.”
Calling it “Balanced free verse — with echoes, at times, of Yusef Komunyakaa,” she continues by saying, “Few poets match Betts’s way with quotable rhetoric. Better yet, he gives good advice: “Suffering in art feels like somebody made/It to tomorrow, at least.”
Read the full review here.