We (the People of the United States)

“An essential addition to the American poetic canon.” —Booklist

From an award-winning poet praised for his “rhapsodic, rigorous” work (The New Yorker) comes an immersive meditation on kinship, collectivity, and environmental thought.

We (The People of The United States) is a book-length poem made to the measure of the modern world. Composed of 55 sections, it features a breathtaking range of characters and concerns:

• The Beach Boys
• Gwendolyn Brooks
• The invention of the typewriter
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Sun Ra
• Life on Mars
• Robert Frost
• Experimental physics
• The Jackson 5

Throughout the collection, Joshua Bennett summons Virgil’s Georgics as a lens through which to not only tell the story of his family, but a much larger one about the “form of the American mind,” our relationship to the natural world, and the pursuit of a dignified, abundant life. Published the year of the nation’s 250th anniversary, it is a collection that is right on time. One that calls us, as Langston Hughes once did, toward a future America that is not yet here, “and yet must be.”