The Sobbing School

by Joshua Bennett, Eugene Gloria (Selected by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101993101
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/27/2016
Series:	Penguin Poets
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	526 KB

About the Author

Poet, performer, and scholar Joshua Bennett is the author of three collections of poetry: The Study of Human Life, Owed, and The Sobbing School; a book of criticism, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man; and a work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History. He received his PhD in English from Princeton University, and is currently Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT. His writing has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2021, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award in Poetry and Nonfiction. He lives in Boston.

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/07/2016
In his scintillating debut, Bennett, a performance poet and 2015 National Poetry Series winner, raises a crucial question about the writing of African-American experience: how can one convey the enormity of black suffering without reducing black life and expression to elegy? Bennett writes, “when I consider extinction,/ I do not think of sad men with guns,” but instead “of our refusal.” Bennett’s poems resist conventional narratives and lyric expectations, riffing on personal and cultural history instead of directly telling a story. “I know/ the respectable man enjoys a dark/ body best when it comes with a good/ cry thrown in,” Bennett writes in the book’s opener, a skillful meditation on the performance and consumption of pain. Another poem, “Yoke,” uses the poet’s family tree to connect Jim Crow–era farming to mass incarceration. Others render his background from surprising angles or in ingenious forms. Two pieces are presented as academic paper abstracts, another adopts the perspective of a cockroach, and “In Defense of Passing” explores the persistent ironies of coloration through science fiction. At its heart, Bennett’s sharp collection is an ode to family, friendship, and culture that neither pulls punches nor withholds sentiment: “despair kills: too slow to cut/ the music from a horn, or set/ my nephew’s laughter to dim.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Sobbing School:
 
“In his scintillating debut, Bennett raises a crucial question about the writing of African-American experience:  how can one convey the enormity of black suffering without reducing black life and expression to elegy? . . . At its heart, Bennett’s sharp collection is an ode to family, friendship and culture that neither pulls punches nor withholds sentiment.”
– Publishers Weekly
 
“Bennett is one of the most impressive voices in poetry today. . .he is also quietly building a reputation as one the brightest intellectual and political thinkers of a new generation.”
– Jesse McCarthy, Dissent Magazine

“'Who can be alive today/and not study grief,’ Joshua Bennett asks in this arresting debut. Yet these poems are no study in grief. Abounding in tenderness and rich with character, these are no quaint lyrics. They leap into our lives, engaging, crackling with wit and intelligence. It’s one of Bennett’s unique gifts—a virtuosic kind of code switching—to deliver a civil tone of I’d rather you didn’t, while we know what he means is, more provocatively, I wish you would.”
– Gregory Pardlo 
 
"At a moment in American culture punctuated to a heartbreaking degree by acts of hatred, violence and disregard, I can think of nothing we need to ponder and to sing of more than our shared grief and our capacity not just for empathy but genuine love. Poetry is critical to such an endeavor—and Joshua Bennett’s astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable."
– Tracy K. Smith

"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

From the Publisher

★ 10/15/2016
Though he does well by debuting with a National Poetry Series winner, Bennett is already well known from the video of his performance for the Obamas at the White House Poetry Jam, which has claimed almost 400,000 views on YouTube. His opening poem, addressed to an escaped slave Henry Box Brown, has Brown performing in "sold out/ shows an ocean away from the place/ that made you possible." Throughout, Bennett clarifies what made him possible, moving from strict Baptist parents who "praise a vengeful god," to school bullies and best friends, to considerations of blackness couched in language both pop culture and high culture. Delivered without showiness, his imagery is indeed arresting; Richard Wright starts a fire "just to see cinder blacken/ his father's hands like the insides of a loganberry pie." VERDICT Highly recommended.

Library Journal