Joshua Bennett is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), and Owed (Penguin, 2020). He is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Bennett holds a PhD in English from Princeton University and an MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ford Foundation, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. His next book of creative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.
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The Sobbing SchoolPoemsFrom"Still Life with Little Brother"
Please, excuse my shadow. I can’t
stop leaving. I don’t know how
to name what I don’t know
well enough to render
in a single sitting. Every poem
about us seems an impossible labor,
like forgetting the face
of the sea, or trying to find
a more perfect name for water.
The Sobbing School:Poems- Print Books
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OwedPoemsFrom"You Are So Articulate with Your Hands"
If my hands speak with conviction
then blame my stupid mouth for its lack
of weaponry or sweetness. I clap when I’m angry
because it’s the best way to get the heat out.
Pop says that my words are bigger
than my mouth but these hands
can block a punch, build a bookcase,
feed a child & when’s the last time
you saw a song do that?
Owed:Poems- Print Books
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From"Where Is Black Life Lived?"
I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the role of air in African American letters. The people that could fly. Eric Garner. Christina Sharpe highlighting the link between anti-black racism and the weather. It bears remembering. For the legal studies scholar and foundational critical race theorist Derrick Bell, one of the first characteristics of the black utopia he describes in his classic vignette, “Afrolantica Awakening,” is that it is simply a place where we can breathe. A space of celebration and retreat, somehow flourishing both inside and beyond the constraints of the present order.
Spoken Word: A Cultural History:- Print Books
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“This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways 20th- and 21st-century African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett’s analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward and others subvert the racist comparisons that have ‘been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.’ . . . An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post [on Being Property Once Myself]
“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 [on The Sobbing School]
“Themes of praise and debt pervade this rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the U.S. . . . Bennett conjures a spirit of kinship that, illuminated by redolent imagery, borders on mythic, and boldly stakes claim to ‘some living, future / English, & everyone in it / is immortal.’” —The New Yorker [on Owed]
Selected Works
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Joshua Bennett’s criticism radically expands ideas of what it is to be alive in the world, reshuffling hierarchies of knowledge and power and hinting at a new way of being; the most exciting criticism is utopian in this way. His poetry is piercingly intelligent – there is so much yearning and emotion alongside a mesmerizing musical craft. It welcomes us intimately into the speaker’s powerful consciousness, into the landscape of his family, his outsiderhood. Bennett takes up the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois in his fluid movement between genres, illuminating what it means to see things as they are and to call them by their most merciless names.