The Sobbing School
Joshua Bennett$17.00
$20.00
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.
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 09/27/2016
ISBN: 9780143111863
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.20lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 0.30d
Review Citations: Library Journal 10/15/2016 pg. 91
Publishers Weekly 11/07/2016
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.
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 09/27/2016
ISBN: 9780143111863
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.20lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 0.30d
Review Citations: Library Journal 10/15/2016 pg. 91
Publishers Weekly 11/07/2016