US/EN
Owed
Joshua Bennett
(Author)
Description
From a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient, a "rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the U.S." (The New Yorker) Gregory Pardlo described Joshua Bennett's first collection of poetry, The Sobbing School, as an arresting debut that was abounding in tenderness and rich with character, with a virtuosic kind of code switching. Bennett's new collection, Owed, is a book with celebration at its center. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care. Spanning the spectrum of genre and form--from elegy and ode to origin myth--these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair. What's more, they ask that we turn to the songs and sites of the historically denigrated so that we might uncover a new way of being in the world together, one wherein we can truthfully reckon with the brutality of the past and thus imagine the possibilities of our shared, unpredictable present, anew.Product Details
Price
$20.00
$18.40
Publisher
Penguin Books
Publish Date
September 01, 2020
Pages
96
Dimensions
5.8 X 8.8 X 0.4 inches | 0.25 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780143133858
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About the Author
Poet, performer, and scholar Joshua Bennett is the author of two collections of poetry, Owed and The Sobbing School, as well as a book of criticism, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf. He received his PhD in English from Princeton University, and is currently Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. His writing has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2021, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award in Poetry and Nonfiction. He lives in Boston.
Reviews
Praise for the work of Joshua Bennett: "In his scintillating debut, Bennett raises a crucial question about the writing of African-American experience: how can one convey the enormity of black suffering without reducing black life and expression to elegy? . . . At its heart, Bennett's sharp collection is an ode to family, friendship and culture that neither pulls punches nor withholds sentiment."
- Publishers Weekly
"Bennett is one of the most impressive voices in poetry today. . .he is also quietly building a reputation as one the brightest intellectual and political thinkers of a new generation."
- Jesse McCarthy, Dissent Magazine "'Who can be alive today/and not study grief, ' Joshua Bennett asks in this arresting debut. Yet these poems are no study in grief. Abounding in tenderness and rich with character, these are no quaint lyrics. They leap into our lives, engaging, crackling with wit and intelligence. It's one of Bennett's unique gifts--a virtuosic kind of code switching--to deliver a civil tone of I'd rather you didn't, while we know what he means is, more provocatively, I wish you would."
- Gregory Pardlo "At a moment in American culture punctuated to a heartbreaking degree by acts of hatred, violence and disregard, I can think of nothing we need to ponder and to sing of more than our shared grief and our capacity not just for empathy but genuine love. Poetry is critical to such an endeavor--and Joshua Bennett's astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable."
- Tracy K. Smith "At the heart of Joshua Bennett's debut collection lies grief, but his poems also pay tribute to the human will to endure. There are glimpses here of James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston where Bennett's syntactical dexterity and feeling for language meet the rhythm and flow of dangerous music. His poems of identity are also poems of imagery and invention, and they testify to poetry's endless mutability through story and song, lament and praise. The Sobbing School is an essential book for our times."
--Eugene Gloria
- Publishers Weekly
"Bennett is one of the most impressive voices in poetry today. . .he is also quietly building a reputation as one the brightest intellectual and political thinkers of a new generation."
- Jesse McCarthy, Dissent Magazine "'Who can be alive today/and not study grief, ' Joshua Bennett asks in this arresting debut. Yet these poems are no study in grief. Abounding in tenderness and rich with character, these are no quaint lyrics. They leap into our lives, engaging, crackling with wit and intelligence. It's one of Bennett's unique gifts--a virtuosic kind of code switching--to deliver a civil tone of I'd rather you didn't, while we know what he means is, more provocatively, I wish you would."
- Gregory Pardlo "At a moment in American culture punctuated to a heartbreaking degree by acts of hatred, violence and disregard, I can think of nothing we need to ponder and to sing of more than our shared grief and our capacity not just for empathy but genuine love. Poetry is critical to such an endeavor--and Joshua Bennett's astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable."
- Tracy K. Smith "At the heart of Joshua Bennett's debut collection lies grief, but his poems also pay tribute to the human will to endure. There are glimpses here of James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston where Bennett's syntactical dexterity and feeling for language meet the rhythm and flow of dangerous music. His poems of identity are also poems of imagery and invention, and they testify to poetry's endless mutability through story and song, lament and praise. The Sobbing School is an essential book for our times."
--Eugene Gloria
