{"title":"Joshua Bennett","description":"\u003cp\u003eDiscover the poignant and powerful poetry of Joshua Bennett. Explore themes of identity, family, and the Black experience through his evocative verses. A must-read for fans of Claudia Rankine and Danez Smith.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"sobbing-school-book-joshua-bennett-9780143111863","title":"The Sobbing School","description":"The debut collection from a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient whose “astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable” (Tracy K. Smith)     The Sobbing School, Joshua Bennett’s mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49537539604753,"sku":"GOR008434247","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49779186467089,"sku":"CIN0143111868G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49781306753297,"sku":"CIN0143111868A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51415522967825,"sku":"CIN0143111868VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53146966458641,"sku":"GOR011677449","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0143111868.jpg?v=1751440939"},{"product_id":"owed-book-joshua-bennett-9780143133858","title":"Owed","description":"Owed is a book with celebration at its centre. 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 unworthy of 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 and 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49653939044625,"sku":"GOR011416765","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737930440977,"sku":"NGR9780143133858","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49931857756433,"sku":"CIN0143133853G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50413488144657,"sku":"CIN0143133853VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999542645009,"sku":"NIN9780143133858","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0143133853.jpg?v=1751004741"},{"product_id":"being-property-once-myself-book-joshua-bennett-9780674271166","title":"Being Property Once Myself","description":"Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons. Joshua Bennett explores the place of animality in works by Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and other black writers, delving into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that emerge from being viewed as a subgenre of the human.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49742457733393,"sku":"NGR9780674271166","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50893879083281,"sku":"CIN0674271165G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53459694813457,"sku":"GOR014931364","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0674271165.jpg?v=1777628601"},{"product_id":"spoken-word-book-joshua-bennett-9781529110487","title":"Spoken Word","description":"The powerful story of an art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion.  'AN ENGAGING HISTORY' New York Times | 'A RICH HYBRID OF MEMOIR AND HISTORY' The New Yorker | 'A MUST-READ' Roger Robinson | 'GALVANISING' Luke Kennard | 'CAPTURES LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE' Therí A. Pickens | 'MAGNIFICENT' Cornel West  In 2009, at only twenty years old, Joshua Bennett was invited to recite a poem for President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House's Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word. Spike Lee and Saul Williams were in the audience, and it turned out to be the very same event where Lin-Manuel Miranda first performed a work-in-progress that revolutionised musical theatre - Hamilton.  Blending memoir and literary analysis, Bennett shows how a handful of visionaries altered modern culture. With passion, wit and erudition, he charts the history of spoken-word poetry, as well as his coming-of-age journey as a writer.   From the early influence of Miguel Algarín and the Nuyorican Poets Café to Amanda Gorman's inauguration poem for President Joe Biden, he celebrates the contributions of legendary figures such as Ntozake Shange, Nikki Giovanni and Miguel Piñero, as well as how artists like MF DOOM, Jill Scott and Mos Def were inspired to develop their craft within their shared tradition.  Spoken Word illuminates the profound influence that poetry has had everywhere melodious words are heard, from the West End to academia, from the podiums of political protest to cafés, from schools to rooms full of strangers all across the world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743018623249,"sku":"NGR9781529110487","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50140760703249,"sku":"GOR013869121","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50198945628433,"sku":"GOR013293562","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53448372027665,"sku":"GOR014926244","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1529110483.jpg?v=1751429621"},{"product_id":"owed-book-joshua-bennett-9781526665270","title":"Owed","description":"From a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient, a 'rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the US' (New Yorker)  Selected as a book of the year by the Telegraph  _______________________________  Owed is a book with celebration at its centre. 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49751316037905,"sku":"NGR9781526665270","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50017988509969,"sku":"GOR013837283","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51588443308305,"sku":"GOR014338365","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1526665271.jpg?v=1750958779"},{"product_id":"spoken-word-book-joshua-bennett-9780525657019","title":"Spoken Word","description":"\u003cb\u003eA rich hybrid of memoir and history (\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e) of the literary art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by one of its influential practitioners, an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBennett...transport s] us back to the city blocks, bars, cafes and stages these artists traversed and inhabited...an instructive text for young poets, artists or creative entrepreneurs trying to find a way to carve out a space for themselves...Shines with a refreshing dynamism. --\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn 2009, when he was twenty years old, Joshua Bennett was invited to perform a spoken word poem for Barack and Michelle Obama, at the same White House Poetry Jam where Lin-Manuel Miranda declaimed the opening bars of a work-in-progress that would soon revolutionize American theater. That meeting is but one among many in the trajectory of Bennett's young life, as he rode the cresting wave of spoken word through the 2010s. In this book, he goes back to its roots, considering the Black Arts movement and the prominence of poetry and song in Black education; the origins of the famed Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side living room of the visionary Miguel Algar n, who hosted verse gatherings with legendary figures like Ntozake Shange and Miguel Pi ero; the rapid growth of the slam format that was pioneered at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago; the perfect storm of spoken word's rise during the explosion of social media; and Bennett's own journey alongside his older sister, whose work to promote the form helped shape spaces online and elsewhere dedicated to literature and the pursuit of human freedom. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eA celebration of voices outside the dominant cultural narrative, who boldly embraced an array of styles and forms and redefined what--and whom--the mainstream would include, Bennett's book illuminates the profound influence spoken word has had everywhere melodious words are heard, from Broadway to academia, from the podiums of political protest to caf s, schools, and rooms full of strangers all across the world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49763376234769,"sku":"CIN0525657010G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50355495829777,"sku":"CIN0525657010VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0525657010.jpg?v=1751040638"},{"product_id":"study-of-human-life-book-joshua-bennett-9780143136828","title":"The Study of Human Life","description":"Across three sequences, Joshua Bennett's new book recalls and reimagines social worlds. Bennett opens with a set of autobiographical poems that deal with themes of family, life, death, vulnerability, and the joys and dreams of youth. The central section, 'The Book of Mycah,' features an alternate history where Malcolm X is resurrected from the dead, as is a young black man shot by the police some fifty years later in Brooklyn. The final section are poems that Bennett has written about fatherhood, on the heels of his own first child being born last fall.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50130358042897,"sku":"CIN0143136828VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50309526225169,"sku":"CIN0143136828A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50451366019345,"sku":"CIN0143136828G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0143136828.jpg?v=1751389237"},{"product_id":"being-property-once-myself-book-joshua-bennett-9780674980303","title":"Being Property Once Myself","description":"Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize  A prizewinning poet argues that Blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal.  Throughout US history, Black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark—in the works of Black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find Black and animal life in fraught proximity.  Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50356529627409,"sku":"CIN0674980301A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51416059347217,"sku":"CIN0674980301G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53483043815697,"sku":"CIN0674980301VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0674980301.jpg?v=1777629958"},{"product_id":"study-of-human-life-book-joshua-bennett-9781526664532","title":"The Study of Human Life","description":"**Winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize** **Longlisted for the Griffin Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award** **Soon to be adapted for screen by Lena Waithe and Warner Bros.**  An award-winning collection and novella exploring the realm of speculative fiction, while addressing issues as varied as abolition, Black ecological consciousness, and the boundless promise of parenthood  Across three sequences, Joshua Bennett’s new book recalls and reimagines social worlds almost but not entirely lost, all while gesturing toward the ones we are building even now, in the midst of a state of emergency, together. Bennett opens with a set of autobiographical poems that deal with themes of family, life, death, vulnerability, and the joys and dreams of youth.   The central section, “The Book of Mycah,” features an alternate history where Malcolm X is resurrected from the dead, as is a young black man shot by the police some fifty years later in Brooklyn.   The final section of The Study of Human Life are poems that Bennett has written about fatherhood, on the heels of his own first child being born.  Praise for Joshua Bennett ‘One of the brightest intellectual and political thinkers of a new generation’ Jesse McCarthy ‘Bennett conjures a spirit of kinship that, illuminated by redolent imagery, borders on mythic’ New Yorker ‘Joshua Bennett’s astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable’ Tracy K Smith","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51216059531537,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51216062021905,"sku":"NGR9781526664532","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52584086405393,"sku":"NLS9781526664532","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52858328285457,"sku":"GOR014644902","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1526664534.jpg?v=1751117457"},{"product_id":"spoken-word-book-joshua-bennett-9781984897862","title":"Spoken Word","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51251607503121,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51251608879377,"sku":"NIN9781984897862","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52071589314833,"sku":"CIN1984897861G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1984897861.jpg?v=1751125835"},{"product_id":"people-can-fly-book-joshua-bennett-9780316576024","title":"The People Can Fly","description":"Whiting award-winning poet and Distinguished Chair of Humanities at MIT, Dr. Joshua Bennett creates a masterful synthesis of personal narrative and history that illuminates the promises and perils of being labelled a Black prodigy.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52489710633233,"sku":"NGR9780316576024","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53069891633425,"sku":"NIN9780316576024","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53142792012049,"sku":"CIN0316576026G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53154796962065,"sku":"CIN0316576026VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780316576024.jpg?v=1772791960"},{"product_id":"god-and-progress-book-joshua-bennett-9780198837725","title":"God and Progress","description":"Exploring the rich relationship between historical thought and religious debate in Victorian culture, God and Progress offers a unique and authoritative account of intellectual change in nineteenth-century Britain. The volume recovers a twofold process in which the growth of progressive ideas of history transformed British Protestant traditions, as religious debate, in turn, profoundly shaped Victorian ideas of history. It adopts a remarkably wide contextual perspective, embracing believers and unbelievers, Anglicans and nonconformists, and writers from different parts of the British Isles, fully situating British debates in relation to their European and especially German Idealist surroundings. The Victorian intellectual mainstream came to terms with religious diversity, changing ethical sensibilities, and new kinds of knowledge by encouraging providential, spiritualized, and developmental understandings of human time. A secular counter-culture simultaneously disturbed this complex consensus, grounding progress in appeals to scientific advances and the retreat of metaphysics. God and Progress thus explores the ways in which divisions within British liberalism were fundamentally related to differences over the past, present, and future of religion. It also demonstrates that religious debate powered the process by which historicism acquired cultural authority in Victorian national life, and later began to lose it. The study reconstructs the ways in which theological dynamics, often relegated to the margins of nineteenth-century British intellectual history, effectively forged its leading patterns.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52516143595793,"sku":"NLS9780198837725","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53062661439761,"sku":"GOR014722321","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780198837725.jpg?v=1776939175"},{"product_id":"we-the-people-of-the-united-states-book-joshua-bennett-9780143138648","title":"We (the People of the United States)","description":"We (The People of The United States) is a book-length poem made to the measure of the modern world. Composed of 55 sections, it features a breathtaking range of characters and concerns: The Beach Boys, Gwendolyn Brooks, the invention of the typewriter, Zora Neale Hurston, Sun Ra, life on Mars, Robert Frost, experimental physics, The Jackson 5. Throughout the collection, Bennett summons Virgil's Georgics as a lens through which to not only tell the story of his family, but a much larger one about the 'form of the American mind,' our relationship to the natural world, and the pursuit of a dignified, abundant life. Published the year of the nation's 250th anniversary, it is a collection that is right on time. One that calls us, as Langston Hughes once did, toward a future America that is not yet here, 'and yet must be.'","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52694652682513,"sku":"NGR9780143138648","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53221785862417,"sku":"NIN9780143138648","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780143138648.jpg?v=1769684144"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-joshua-bennett.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}