Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
An acclaimed poet further extends his range into the realm of
speculative fiction, while addressing issues as varied as abolition,
Black ecological consciousness, and the boundless promise of parenthood
Featuring the novella "The Book of Mycah," soon to be adapted by Lena
Waithe's Hillman Grad Productions & Warner Bros. TV
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.