The Sobbing School
by Joshua Bennett
Publication Date: Sep 27, 2016
List Price: $18.00
Format: Paperback, 96 pages
Classification: Poetry
ISBN13: 9780143111863
Imprint: Penguin Books
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Paperback Description:
A "sharp" and "scintillating" (Publishers Weekly) debut collection of poetry, selected by Eugene Gloria as a winner of the National Poetry Series
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.
A "sharp" and "scintillating" (Publishers Weekly) debut collection of poetry, selected by Eugene Gloria as a winner of the National Poetry Series
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.
Books similiar to The Sobbing School may be found in the categories below:
- Poetry / American / African American & Black
- Poetry / American / General
- Poetry / Subjects & Themes / Family