You Betta WRITE! Poetry E-Book

Adverse change in social climate often warrants a shift in tone when addressing it—one with a higher decibel than before. The level of anguish and overall chaos in our world has taken its toll on many. In You Betta WRITE!, Charlene E. Green gives readers a deeper, grittier poetic look at the challenges we've faced in recent years, using free verse, haiku, and sonnet to paint her picture of inspiration, justice, and resolution.

In "The Suffering," she boldly declares that we've "got hella PhDs in the suffering of others, but ... some of us still don't have a degree of comprehension about how to master our own." In "Accident Forgiveness," she shakes the abused awake by asking how many more "fist-on collisions with your face will it take for you to finally admit that this man is not accident prone, he is purposely reckless with your life?" "Curfew" is a heart-wrenching, parent-focused narrative about the more than 200 missing Nigerian girls, at the hands of Boko Haram. But since Charlene's work is never complete without the inclusion of wit, love, and fantasy, you can be assured of just the right amount of gentle to balance out her firm voice.

You Betta WRITE! is for the grown and mature, and for those whose lives are ready for a deep cleaning, upgraded perspective, and new direction.

REVIEWS:

You Betta WRITE!, Paul Preuss

What follows is, frankly, inadequate. Reading your poems was a nonstop revelation of truth, power, empathy, experience, and skill. Sometimes it was funny. Sometimes it was beautiful. It was always profoundly moving.

I love books and generally try not to mess mine up, but when I get a good one I'm prone to dog-earing it. That was the fate of You Betta WRITE! So many lines, so many poems I wanted to make sure I could find again fast.

A paragraph in the second section of the free verse part, from "My Apologies to the War Heroines"

I'm sorry that in your world sending them to the store is synonymous with sending them to their grave

 which, although far from alone in this book in its power, just leaped off the page and hit me right between the eyes as one of the most cogent statements of the mess this country is in I've read anywhere. Nineteen words that say more than a crate full of New York Times articles, from a poem about an issue that bears more and more heavily on anyone even half conscious.

Your reach doesn't begin to stop there. Some rare and unique statements are gentle and personal, like the one that begins

Let's meet At our spot The one with our initials Already carved Into the Universe's memory

While others are just as personal but far from gentle. "Tally," for example:

That one moment you stopped counting his infractions added up your worth divided yourself from your fears multiplied your faith and subtracted him from your life

 And the ones that are downright funny at the same time they remind us of the subtlest of human interactions:

across the grooves of my lifelines will be all the answers I'll need to slide summa cum laude effortlessly into your soul

Okay! Stop me before I quote about 150 pages of poetry. My point is simple: you are wonderfully gifted, with a voice -- voices, I mean, each always right on -- that deserve to be heard and read far and wide.

I've been enthusing over the free verse, but equally enjoyed your excursions into sonnets and haiku, which in each case produced work unlike anything I've read. A haiku that doesn't twitter about falling cherry blossoms but reminds us that karma's a beast packs terrific punch. As throughout the book, the sections for black life and black youth in each part lifted me a little higher in understanding.

You succeeded in many unexpected ways in achieving your stated goal of inspiring this reader to strive for personal goals (in my case, in fiction) by sharing your experiences. Thank you, Charlene. 

You Betta WRITE!, Mary Etta Williams

 Wow, Lady! Finally finished You Betta WRITE! You are so awesome and quite deep! Again, it is an AWESOME READ!