Joshua Bennett

From "one of the most impressive voices in poetry today" (Dissent magazine), a new collection that shines a light on forgotten or obscured parts of the past in order to reconstruct a deeper, truer vision of the present 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.

Owed

A Cultural History

Spoken Word

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Leon Wieseltier

David Thomson

Ramachandra Guha

Michael Ignatieff

Mark Lilla

Sean Wilentz

Louise Glück

Adam Zagajewski

David Grossman

Sally Satel

Hannah Sullivan

Laura Kipnis

Helen Vendler

Andrea Marcolongo

James Wolcott

Clara Collier

Celeste Marcus

Eli Lake

Moshe Halbertal

Julius Margolin

Shawn McCreesh

Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics is a quarterly of essays and poetry from some of the world's most celebrated independent thinkers, leading artists, and up-and-coming literary voices.

Volume I, Issue 1

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics

A prize-winning 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 antiblackness 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.

Blackness and the End of Man

Being Property Once Myself

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) 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.

Study of Human Life

A third collection that reveals an acclaimed poet further extending his range into 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 last fall.

The Study of Human Life

What is your freedom worth?Would you join the rebellion?Would you fight for the devil?Would you kill a god?In a world of gods and demons. Mortals have been segregated into those that can use magic and those that cannot.The elite, those that can use magic live a life of luxury and gluttony.The cursed, those that cannot use magic force themselves into slavery to cleanse their blood lines of an ancient curse in the eyes of their gods, the Valkyrie.When whispers of the devil forming a rebellion begin to surface. Four young cursed gang members must choose between slaving for their gods or fighting back with the rebellion to claim a better life.When the truth of the world is slowly forced into the light it becomes clear there is far more evil in the world than could ever be imagined.

Demons of the Blood Moon

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

Joshua Bennett

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