The sobbing school
By: Joshua Bennett
Series: Penguin poets; National poetry series; Penguin poets; National poetry series
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 73
ISBN-13: 9780143111863
Subjects: American poetry
Description: "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"--