Betts received his PhD in English literature from York University, supervised by John Lennox, Steve McCaffery, and Ray Ellenwood.

[12][13] In addition to his books, Betts is the author of chapbooks and text collaborations with visual artists, including Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel, Neil Hennessy, and Arnold McBay.

[17] In 2017, he received a City of St. Catharines Arts Award ("Jury's Pick")[18] and in 2018, he was named the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at the University College of Dublin, Ireland.

[19] Dr. Susan E. Parker, UBC’s University Librarian, said, “The story laid out in this book, which is at once coherent and many-dimensioned, represents a huge volume of research material that has been thoroughly examined and analyzed.

A contributor to the Lime Tree blog opined that "the poems hover on the edge of convincing signification, but lapse interestingly into arbitrary pseudo-sense and tonal oddness at every turn."

Reviewing the collection in the Peek of Reach blog, Morgan Lucas Schuldt stated: "What sort of writer has the patience to pull off this kind of project?

The collection of poems was accomplished by deleting words or letters from William Shakespeare's Sonnet 150 in order to create adapted works of poetry.

Through essays, short fiction, and a novella, Betts displays Brooker's views on culture, technology, and society as well as his hesitations with modernism.

Reviewing the book in This, Jonathan Ball observed that Betts's arrangement of the content helps to "produce strange, brilliant, unintentional wordplay, with accidentally clever insights that are often laugh-out-loud funny."