From a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient, a
"rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday
Black experience in the U.S." (The New Yorker)
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.