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The Sobbing School Joshua Bennett

The Sobbing School By Joshua Bennett

The Sobbing School by Joshua Bennett


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Condition - Very Good
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The Sobbing School Summary

The Sobbing School by Joshua Bennett

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.

The Sobbing School Reviews

Praise for The Sobbing School:

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

About Joshua Bennett

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.

Additional information

GOR008434247
9780143111863
0143111868
The Sobbing School by Joshua Bennett
Used - Very Good
Paperback
Penguin Putnam Inc
20160927
96
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - The Sobbing School