Author Biography

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.

Review

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)

Review Quote

Praise for The Study of Human Life : "With a singularly expansive and compassionate view of history, Bennett sweeps across generations of joy, suffering, and connection." -- Lit Hub "[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)

Excerpt from Book

Trash What critics throw away I love the more; I love to stoop and look among the weeds, To find a flower I never knew before -John Clare One man''s waste is another man''s soap / Son''s fan base know the brother man''s dope -MF DOOM I knew life Started from where I stood in the dark, Looking out into the light, & that sometimes I could see Everything through nothing. -Yusef Komunyakaa 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. IV (CROWN OF THORNS) The American Negro is an invention. He innovates & endarkens our innermost visions of the human species. The American Negro is an intervention. He is interdisciplinary & interstellar; intellectually amphibious, indiscriminately savage. Indeed, The American Negro is, on average, quite humorous, if only indirectly. Most often he is more so akin to automata, a kind of rudimentary artificial intelligence in its infancy. Even still, the American Negro is, in most cases, indefatigable. An infinite resource. His anguish, infinitesimal. His aspirations? Indiscernible. Just imagine: an invincible apparition. An invaluable addition to the instruments in the shed. The indomitable soul of the Negro is an impulse toward abolition, some dead man somewhere wrote in a book that I once read. Off with his head, they said. They said books were the way through the brook of fire blackness was, so my boys & I steeped ourselves in whatever Ivy League library shelves lent us in our late teens, early twenties, until we sparkled proper articulate doctor of philosophy, master''s, pastor, preacher, poet, scholar of arts & human sciences, trained by institutional schemes geared toward certain kinds of compliance, aesthetic & other -wise, my brothers shine brightest when the lights are on. Politics honed by threat & adoration. Theft of language named primary education named home training named lower your tone don''t say that about the ones who love you enough to put up with such arrogance as a matter of course of course you are martyr messiah gangster never survivor son somebody''s baby boy beyond the age of five or six you see the signs of life you cannot ever own you know the way it is. You know the way it was back then: futility in any direction, we figured, unless you hooped or had bars like X or Jay, a recording booth you could use to spin those imagined lines of verse, urgent as the discourse of markets that would one day dart across our screens, into poetry no one knew by that name. Or lawyers, perhaps, since we cherished argument above all other forms. Or preachers like my uncle, who drove a midnight -blue Mercedes, spoke with a voice that was its own object & force, solid as the side of a destroyer. Never let them say we were aimless. Amidst Hennessy altars & tall tees adorned with faces of boys made ancestors by casual misunderstandings, we cast images into the air of lives we had only heard tell of via network TV, contraband lyrics pulled from dial-up sessions that lasted hours before parents came home to kick us off the line, jettison the crew back into worlds where words had an irrevocable heft to them & we were mortal again & anonymous no longer. Several notches above anonymous. Ella Fitzgerald hails from Yonkers. We shed th

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