Overview

**Winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize** **Longlisted for the Griffin Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award** **Soon to be adapted for screen by Lena Waithe and Warner Bros.** An award-winning collection and novella exploring the realm of speculative fiction, while addressing issues as varied as abolition, Black ecological consciousness, and the boundless promise of parenthood 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. Praise for Joshua Bennett ‘One of the brightest intellectual and political thinkers of a new generation’ Jesse McCarthy ‘Bennett conjures a spirit of kinship that, illuminated by redolent imagery, borders on mythic’ New Yorker ‘Joshua Bennett’s astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable’ Tracy K Smith

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9781526664532

Table of Contents

Reviews

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 *

Author Information

Dr. Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016) — which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is also the author of Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022) and Spoken Word: A Cultural History, which is forthcoming from Knopf. He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is a Professor of English at Dartmouth College.

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