The Study of Human Life

by Joshua Bennett Narrated by Joshua Bennett

Overview

Winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the Griffin Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for The Study of Human Life:

“A tender celebration of vulnerability and the strength that blooms quietly in its presence.” —The Atlantic, “Ten Poetry Collections to Read Again and Again”

“With a singularly expansive and compassionate view of history, Bennett sweeps across generations of joy, suffering, and connection.” —Lit Hub

“A unique and nuanced window into the effects of generational trauma and state-sanctioned violence, as well as powerful insistence that trauma cannot and will not be the defining characteristic of future generations . . . The Study of Human Life is every bit as layered and complex as readers might expect from Bennett, who has established himself as an intensely patient and deliberate writer capable of upending genre as seamlessly as he upends our understanding of the world.” —The Poetry Question

“[Features] a multifaceted prose-poem of striking depth and originality . . . Though Bennett’s poems seem effortless in their lyric grace and organic progressions, they are better described as effortful, given memorable presence by their intimacy, mindful craft, and visionary pursuit. Expect this work to appear on many 'best poetry' lists for 2022.” —Library Journal (starred review)

Praise for Bennett's previous collection, Owed:

“Themes of praise and debt pervade this rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the U.S. . . . Bennett conjures a spirit of kinship that, illuminated by redolent imagery, borders on mythic, and boldly stakes claim to ‘some living, future / English, & everyone in it / is immortal.’” —The New Yorker

“Bennett captures the beauty of what really matters in life—the memories, youth sports, family traditions and little moments that many of us take for granted . . . [Owed] couldn't have been more timely.” —Salon

“Not only are these poems eloquent but also lyrical, intelligent, and, occasionally, funny. Most reflect upon and communicate the pain, joy, and intensity of the current Black experience . . . In a time when many confront and protest the racism prevalent in our society, Bennett’s new book is vital.” —Library Journal (starred review) 

“[Owed] intertwines the author’s multifaceted professions as poet, performer, and professor through powerful, crisp poems that celebrate the complexity, joy, and heartbreak of the Black experience in America . . . Bennett’s poems are more necessary than ever.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Library Journal

★ 09/01/2022

In "Dad Poem," the last of the three poetic sequences composing Bennett's third collection (after Owed), a poem is defined as the place "where the language of the material world collides/ with the divine." An eyewitness to and interpreter of that collision, Bennett draws on lived experiences—new fatherhood, his own childhood, the stain of contemporary racism—"to dream of a world, some heaven,/ big enough for a black life/ to flourish." The poet readily acknowledges "the pain we never knew we never knew" yet presents a powerful work of Black affirmation. "The Book of Mycah," his remythologizing of the death of Malcolm X within the context of an all-too-contemporary neighborhood police killing ("Our overcoming is ongoing") is a multifaceted prose-poem of striking depth and originality. VERDICT Though Bennett's poems seem effortless in their lyric grace ("the vanishing/ world of living things no louder than the sound/ of insects whimpering in their dust-sized sorrows") and organic progressions, they are better described as effortful, given memorable presence by their intimacy, mindful craft, and visionary pursuit. Expect this work to appear on many "best poetry" lists for 2022.—Fred Muratori

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178631058
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/20/2022
Series:	Penguin Poets
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Trash

I

All the men I loved were dead
-beats by birthright or so the legend

went. The ledger said three out of every four of us were

destined for a cell or lead shells flitting like comets

through our heads. As a boy,
my mother made me write

& sign contracts to express the worthlessness of a man's

word. Just like your father,
she said, whenever I would lie,

or otherwise warp the historical record to get my way. Even then,

I knew the link between me
& the old man was pure

negation, bad habits, some awful hyphen filled with blood. I have half

my father's face & not a measure of his flair for the dramatic. Never once

have I prayed & had another man's wife wail in return. Both burden & blessing alike,

it seemed, this beauty he carried like a dead doe. No one called him Father

of the Year. But come wintertime, he would wash
& cocoa butter us until our curls shone like lodestone,

bodies wrapped in three layers of cloth just to keep December's iron

bite at bay. And who would have thought to thank him then? Or else turn

& expunge the record, given all we know now of war & its unquantifiable cost,

the way living through everyone around you dying kills something elemental, ancient.

At a certain point, it all comes back to survival, is what I am saying.

There are men he killed to become this man. The human brain is a soft

gray cage. He doesn't know what else he can do with his hands.

II

The Knicks were trash. Head colds at the outset of a South Bronx summer:

trash. The second hour after she is gone,
the moment the song you both used to slow

-dance through the kitchenette to comes on, moving on: all trash.

Death is trash. Love is a robust engagement with the trash of another.

Monthly bills of any kind are trash,
although access to gas and electricity

is not, so there is that to consider.
Blackouts are incontrovertibly

trash. Much like student loans, or the fact that we live in a culture of debt such that one

must always be behind to make some semblance of what our elders might have called living.

My friends often state in the midst of otherwise loving group chat missives that life is trash, though

we all keep trying to make one for some reason or another, and the internet says my friends are trash,

that black men and boys are trash, and it makes me think of the high Germanic roots of garbage-which

is perhaps the first cousin of trash-that part of the animal one does not eat, and we are sort of like that, no?

Modernity's refuse, disposable flesh and spectacular failure, fuel and fodder,

corpses abundant as the trash on the floor of the world.

Aging is trash. I am years past thirty now and so any further time qualifies

as statistical anomaly,
you can't expect good

results with bad data, trash in, trash out, they say,

and I'm really just searching for better, more redemptive

language is the thing,
some version of the story

where all the characters inside look like me and every

single one of us escapes with our heads.

III

Saturdays, it was my job to pick the bones from cans of fish which became the unwieldy

piles of pink flesh that, once fried, became the cakes we ate for dinner that night, breakfast the next

day, dinner again to close the loop. Decades passed before I saw the beast in real time, realized, like Baldwin-

who once saw his mother lift a yard of velvet, say that is a good idea, and for months thought ideas were shocks

of black fabric-that salmon lived outside the bounds of Foodtown shelves

we searched for deals in the early '90s,
supermarket circulars held tight

in our too-small hands, armaments against American cost. Older now,

a literary type with insurance to boot, I tell you this story

at our kitchen table, unsure of what
I am trying to convey, exactly.

Something about the flexible nature of human knowledge,

perhaps: a speed course in semiotics over poached eggs. Or maybe

some version of the same tale
I am always telling, that the wall

between the world & me grew weaker once I left

what I loved. Children of the poor, their small words

& smaller sense of scale.
Back then, life on Earth

was Yonkers, NY,
& my grandmother's salon.

Every leather-bound book was a Word of God. And there I was,

an affront to history, creative, even in my ignorance, sketching planets

in the air as my big sister sang soul outside my bedroom window, her voice

like something ancient and winged,
pulling summer into being.

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