Book

The sobbing school / Joshua Bennett.

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Record details

ISBN: 9780143111863
ISBN: 0143111868
Physical Description: xvii, 73 pages ; 22 cm.
Publisher: New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2016]

Content descriptions

Formatted Contents Note:

In defense of Henry Box Brown -- On extinction -- Invocation -- Yoke -- Taxonomy -- Didn't Old Pharaoh get lost in the Red Sea: theorizing amnesia in Afro-diasporic maritime literature -- Theodicy -- Run -- Still life with first best friend -- Fade --Whenever Hemingway hums nigger -- Teacher's aide -- Praise song for the table in the cafeteria where all the black boys sat together during a block, laughing too loudly -- In defense of passing -- Fly -- Absolutely true facts about Richard Wright -- Clench -- Self-portrait as Periplaneta Americana -- On stupidity -- First date -- Variation on the father as narcissus -- Fresh -- The order of things -- Ode to the equipment manager -- Family reunion -- Praise house -- VCR&B -- In defense of DMX -- Ode to the mascot -- The sobbing school -- Black history, abridged -- Home force: presumption of death -- Tenacious elegy: insurgent life in the era of trial by gunfire with a line from Sylvia Wynter -- Anthropophobia -- Aubade with insomnia -- Samson reconsiders -- Love poem ending with typewriters -- On flesh -- Still life with little brother -- On blueness -- X --Preface to a twenty-volume regicide note.