The Sobbing School
  • Published: 15 January 2017
  • ISBN: 9780143111863
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

The Sobbing School

Formats & editions
EBook
27 Sep 2016
Paperback
15 Jan 2017
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Selected by Eugene Gloria as a winner of the National Poetry Series - an extended meditation on both the terror and the persistent beauty of black life in modernity

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.
  • Published: 15 January 2017
  • ISBN: 9780143111863
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

Praise for The Sobbing School

"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

"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