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The Study of Human Life

Part of Penguin Poets

Author Joshua Bennett
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Paperback
$20.00 US
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books
On sale Sep 20, 2022 | 144 Pages | 978-0-14-313682-8
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  • English > Comparative Literature: American > African American Poetry
  • English > Literature > American Literature – Poetry
  • About
  • Excerpt
  • Author
Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize

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.
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 the 2 train, kept

our debt. Middle-class intentions fail in Yonkers. I left.

Wrung my hands. Got a therapist. Medicated heads

prevail in Yonkers. Whole Foods? Does not compute.

Even our hunger is loyal. It's 1999. No Jamba Juice

or kale in Yonkers. My father is a star. Prayed the pews

to tears last week. Once, his love, it lifted me. Then

my faith in blood grew frail. In Yonkers, I bloomed:

a manageable stain. Bodies falling maim the night.

Fistfights gone off the rails. We have no sense

of scale in Yonkers. The letter flew like a ghost

in a ghost costume through the front door.

A scholarship: my last piece of mail in Yonkers.


My last piece of mail last year was a book of poems by Denis Johnson

named in honor of the artist James Hampton, who built a sculpture

from tinfoil & cardboard big enough to fill a room, which it does, even

as I write this, it looms gargantuan over its own space in the Smithsonian,

labeled in accordance with its grandeur & glamour, its luminous gold

& aluminum grammar, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium

General Assembly, which is the only known work of art Hampton crafted

in his 55 years on Earth, the latter part of which he labored as a janitor,

night after night, gathering metal for a masterwork he built in secret, a scene

almost Vulcanic, hammering in the silent darkness of a Washington,

D.C., garage miles away from where the work would one day stand, first

discovered by a landlord on the hunt for overdue rent, the irony of which

merits consideration elsewhere, perhaps, yet I am here, first, to celebrate

James, the tireless genius, his throne built not only, you see, from what

most would call garbage, detritus, unworthy or nothing at all, but dreams

like a second flesh no earthly weapon formed against him could kill.


General consensus in our home was candy or soda could kill us,

or else rot our constitutions in some larger, metaphysical sense.

Body & soul, to cite the old wisdom. In protest, my big sister

& I would sneak the stuff through customs whenever we could:

Swedish Fish & ginger beer, Kit Kats, Mary Janes & Malta

lining the sides of each pocket like the contraband spoils

they were, smallest joys, our solitary arms in this war against

the invisible wall our parents built to bar the world of dreams.

Now that we are older, the mystery is all but gone. We were poor.

Teeth cost. In the end, it was the same as any worthwhile

piece of ancient lore: love obscured by law, our clumsy hands

demanding heaven, forgetting the bounty in our bellies,

the miracles our mother made from Jiffy mix & cans

of greens, all the pain we never knew we never knew

held there, against our will, in the citadel of her care.


In the citadel of her care, we grew tall. Memorized verses

from the King James Bible, the evidence of things not seen

all around us each day. Here, I learned to separate the plane

of what I could hear & smell from the landscape our mother

traversed in visions, though it was as real to me as new weather:

cold made visible by breathing, heat so high in June a crisp

dollar for AriZona iced tea seemed to me a vast fortune.

I had never pondered the long history of credit, barter, fiat,

& trade, though I knew there was a power money claimed

over us that was almost unnameable, appeared only in phrases:

Con Edison is not our friend, she said, when I left a light on for

too long, or the well-worn classic, but do you have McDonald's

money? Even there, I now hear a tenderness I could not before,

her making sure I knew my true home was in another realm,

another life, beyond our temporary house by the trees.


I bought a house by the trees to feel properly integrated,

whole, to cover the gaps in my long-standing

argument with our era of metal & light.

A man of the city turned back to the woodland life

not for peace, but a meaningful portion of entropy: rabbits

sprinting in pairs across the street, half-grown deer leap

-frogging bottles of Amstel behind our community

garden, where someone's responsible parents grow

squash & snap peas to honor the vanishing

world of living things no louder than the sound

of insects whimpering in their dust-sized sorrows.

You can feel the invincible bond of everything

if you just take a minute. If when the emptiness beckons,

you can leap into the blackness of its call.


Attack, balderdash, blackness (they call from the rafters), blather

-skite, claptrap, codswallop, crap, a dollop of damns in generally

pristine prose or speech, drivel, dross, effluvia, fiddle-faddle, flap

-doodle (a personal favorite), folderol, garbage, guff, hogwash,

hokum, horsefeathers (you can almost envision Pegasus mid-flight),

humbug, imitation (not the thing itself but the accusation), jazz, junk,

kaput, lambast, loss, malarkey, mass entertainment, mass incarceration's

psychic aim (a problem isn't real if you no longer see it), muck, mush,

nonsense, nuts, oblivion, piffle, poppycock, quagmire, refuse, rubbish,

slush, tommyrot, tosh, trash (as in the everyday phenomenon but

also talk), twaddle, undercard (ostensibly), underdog (mentally,

you recite their harms before the fight begins), vilipend, wreckage,

excess, extra, yak, youth that cannot be used, zip, zero, easy.


Zero chance we dodge the pernicious myth of ethical excess, easy

money everywhere, without the influence of various underpaid saints,

some in places you might expect, like Mrs. Riggs in Sunday school,

who taught us Truth cut in more than one direction, said Scripture was both

law & mythos, stories to act out in vibrant color (costumes & all) & breath

of God to weigh in community, or Mr. Bernard, local librarian, who taught

me to navigate the stacks at ten with maps I then committed to memory, or

Ms. Simms, who wrote comments on my report card like Joshua Bennett is a witty

elocutionist & I had no idea what that meant, so I looked it up in the big red

Webster's beside my bed because that is what my mother made me do

whenever I was faced with the unfamiliar & the unfamiliar was everywhere

those years, on campus, when Ms. Anita swiped us into the dining hall

knowing we were broke & would be for at least two more days before

the work-study check kicked in, & thus rescued us, is what I am trying

to say to anyone who will listen, the jaws of the thresher were thrown

wide open & they were what stood, masterless, unkillable, in its way.

Some of these microscopic invertebrates shrug off temperatures

of minus 272 Celsius, one degree warmer than absolute zero.
Copyright © 2022 by Joshua Bennett. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
© Rog Walker
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). 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. View titles by Joshua Bennett

About

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize

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.

Excerpt

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 the 2 train, kept

our debt. Middle-class intentions fail in Yonkers. I left.

Wrung my hands. Got a therapist. Medicated heads

prevail in Yonkers. Whole Foods? Does not compute.

Even our hunger is loyal. It's 1999. No Jamba Juice

or kale in Yonkers. My father is a star. Prayed the pews

to tears last week. Once, his love, it lifted me. Then

my faith in blood grew frail. In Yonkers, I bloomed:

a manageable stain. Bodies falling maim the night.

Fistfights gone off the rails. We have no sense

of scale in Yonkers. The letter flew like a ghost

in a ghost costume through the front door.

A scholarship: my last piece of mail in Yonkers.


My last piece of mail last year was a book of poems by Denis Johnson

named in honor of the artist James Hampton, who built a sculpture

from tinfoil & cardboard big enough to fill a room, which it does, even

as I write this, it looms gargantuan over its own space in the Smithsonian,

labeled in accordance with its grandeur & glamour, its luminous gold

& aluminum grammar, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium

General Assembly, which is the only known work of art Hampton crafted

in his 55 years on Earth, the latter part of which he labored as a janitor,

night after night, gathering metal for a masterwork he built in secret, a scene

almost Vulcanic, hammering in the silent darkness of a Washington,

D.C., garage miles away from where the work would one day stand, first

discovered by a landlord on the hunt for overdue rent, the irony of which

merits consideration elsewhere, perhaps, yet I am here, first, to celebrate

James, the tireless genius, his throne built not only, you see, from what

most would call garbage, detritus, unworthy or nothing at all, but dreams

like a second flesh no earthly weapon formed against him could kill.


General consensus in our home was candy or soda could kill us,

or else rot our constitutions in some larger, metaphysical sense.

Body & soul, to cite the old wisdom. In protest, my big sister

& I would sneak the stuff through customs whenever we could:

Swedish Fish & ginger beer, Kit Kats, Mary Janes & Malta

lining the sides of each pocket like the contraband spoils

they were, smallest joys, our solitary arms in this war against

the invisible wall our parents built to bar the world of dreams.

Now that we are older, the mystery is all but gone. We were poor.

Teeth cost. In the end, it was the same as any worthwhile

piece of ancient lore: love obscured by law, our clumsy hands

demanding heaven, forgetting the bounty in our bellies,

the miracles our mother made from Jiffy mix & cans

of greens, all the pain we never knew we never knew

held there, against our will, in the citadel of her care.


In the citadel of her care, we grew tall. Memorized verses

from the King James Bible, the evidence of things not seen

all around us each day. Here, I learned to separate the plane

of what I could hear & smell from the landscape our mother

traversed in visions, though it was as real to me as new weather:

cold made visible by breathing, heat so high in June a crisp

dollar for AriZona iced tea seemed to me a vast fortune.

I had never pondered the long history of credit, barter, fiat,

& trade, though I knew there was a power money claimed

over us that was almost unnameable, appeared only in phrases:

Con Edison is not our friend, she said, when I left a light on for

too long, or the well-worn classic, but do you have McDonald's

money? Even there, I now hear a tenderness I could not before,

her making sure I knew my true home was in another realm,

another life, beyond our temporary house by the trees.


I bought a house by the trees to feel properly integrated,

whole, to cover the gaps in my long-standing

argument with our era of metal & light.

A man of the city turned back to the woodland life

not for peace, but a meaningful portion of entropy: rabbits

sprinting in pairs across the street, half-grown deer leap

-frogging bottles of Amstel behind our community

garden, where someone's responsible parents grow

squash & snap peas to honor the vanishing

world of living things no louder than the sound

of insects whimpering in their dust-sized sorrows.

You can feel the invincible bond of everything

if you just take a minute. If when the emptiness beckons,

you can leap into the blackness of its call.


Attack, balderdash, blackness (they call from the rafters), blather

-skite, claptrap, codswallop, crap, a dollop of damns in generally

pristine prose or speech, drivel, dross, effluvia, fiddle-faddle, flap

-doodle (a personal favorite), folderol, garbage, guff, hogwash,

hokum, horsefeathers (you can almost envision Pegasus mid-flight),

humbug, imitation (not the thing itself but the accusation), jazz, junk,

kaput, lambast, loss, malarkey, mass entertainment, mass incarceration's

psychic aim (a problem isn't real if you no longer see it), muck, mush,

nonsense, nuts, oblivion, piffle, poppycock, quagmire, refuse, rubbish,

slush, tommyrot, tosh, trash (as in the everyday phenomenon but

also talk), twaddle, undercard (ostensibly), underdog (mentally,

you recite their harms before the fight begins), vilipend, wreckage,

excess, extra, yak, youth that cannot be used, zip, zero, easy.


Zero chance we dodge the pernicious myth of ethical excess, easy

money everywhere, without the influence of various underpaid saints,

some in places you might expect, like Mrs. Riggs in Sunday school,

who taught us Truth cut in more than one direction, said Scripture was both

law & mythos, stories to act out in vibrant color (costumes & all) & breath

of God to weigh in community, or Mr. Bernard, local librarian, who taught

me to navigate the stacks at ten with maps I then committed to memory, or

Ms. Simms, who wrote comments on my report card like Joshua Bennett is a witty

elocutionist & I had no idea what that meant, so I looked it up in the big red

Webster's beside my bed because that is what my mother made me do

whenever I was faced with the unfamiliar & the unfamiliar was everywhere

those years, on campus, when Ms. Anita swiped us into the dining hall

knowing we were broke & would be for at least two more days before

the work-study check kicked in, & thus rescued us, is what I am trying

to say to anyone who will listen, the jaws of the thresher were thrown

wide open & they were what stood, masterless, unkillable, in its way.

Some of these microscopic invertebrates shrug off temperatures

of minus 272 Celsius, one degree warmer than absolute zero.
Copyright © 2022 by Joshua Bennett. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

© Rog Walker
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). 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. View titles by Joshua Bennett

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    978-0-14-313621-7
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 06, 2021
  • Little Big Bully
    Little Big Bully
    Heid E. Erdrich
    978-0-14-313592-0
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Oct 06, 2020
  • Owed
    Owed
    Joshua Bennett
    978-0-14-313385-8
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Sep 01, 2020
  • The Nightfields
    The Nightfields
    Joanna Klink
    978-0-14-313539-5
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jul 07, 2020
  • Tertulia
    Tertulia
    Vincent Toro
    978-0-14-313534-0
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 02, 2020
  • Lean Against This Late Hour
    Lean Against This Late Hour
    Garous Abdolmalekian
    978-0-14-313493-0
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 14, 2020
  • For the Ride
    For the Ride
    Alice Notley
    978-0-14-313457-2
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Mar 03, 2020
  • Fear of Description
    Fear of Description
    Daniel Poppick
    978-0-14-313438-1
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Oct 01, 2019
  • Forage
    Forage
    Rose McLarney
    978-0-14-313319-3
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Sep 03, 2019
  • Spiritual Exercises
    Spiritual Exercises
    Mark Yakich
    978-0-14-313327-8
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jul 02, 2019
  • Sightseer in This Killing City
    Sightseer in This Killing City
    Eugene Gloria
    978-0-14-313384-1
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 04, 2019
  • The Crazy Bunch
    The Crazy Bunch
    Willie Perdomo
    978-0-14-313269-1
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 02, 2019
  • Dolefully, A Rampart Stands
    Dolefully, A Rampart Stands
    Paige Ackerson-Kiely
    978-0-14-313268-4
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Feb 05, 2019
  • Museum of the Americas
    Museum of the Americas
    J. Michael Martinez
    978-0-14-313344-5
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Oct 02, 2018
  • Spell
    Spell
    Ann Lauterbach
    978-0-14-313352-0
    $22.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Oct 02, 2018
  • Trickster Feminism
    Trickster Feminism
    Anne Waldman
    978-0-14-313236-3
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jul 03, 2018
  • American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
    American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
    Terrance Hayes
    978-0-14-313318-6
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 19, 2018
  • Blue Rose
    Blue Rose
    Carol Muske-Dukes
    978-0-14-313125-0
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 03, 2018
  • Night School
    Night School
    Carl Dennis
    978-0-14-313235-6
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 03, 2018
  • Rift of Light
    Rift of Light
    William Logan
    978-0-14-313182-3
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Oct 03, 2017
  • Madness
    Madness
    Sam Sax
    978-0-14-313170-0
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Sep 12, 2017
  • In Darwin's Room
    In Darwin's Room
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    978-0-14-313131-1
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 06, 2017
  • Quickening Fields
    Quickening Fields
    Pattiann Rogers
    978-0-14-313132-8
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 06, 2017
  • Box
    Box
    Robert Wrigley
    978-0-14-313056-7
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Mar 28, 2017
  • Map to the Stars
    Map to the Stars
    Adrian Matejka
    978-0-14-313057-4
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 28, 2017
  • Stairway to Heaven
    Stairway to Heaven
    Poems
    Alison Hawthorne Deming
    978-0-14-310885-6
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 27, 2016
  • The Sobbing School
    The Sobbing School
    Joshua Bennett
    978-0-14-311186-3
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 27, 2016
  • Certain Magical Acts
    Certain Magical Acts
    Alice Notley
    978-0-14-310816-0
    $21.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jun 07, 2016
  • Plenty
    Plenty
    Corinne Lee
    978-0-14-310817-7
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jun 07, 2016
  • Mr. Memory & Other Poems
    Mr. Memory & Other Poems
    Phillis Levin
    978-0-14-312811-3
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 29, 2016
  • A Woman of Property
    A Woman of Property
    Robyn Schiff
    978-0-14-312827-4
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 08, 2016
  • Viability
    Viability
    Sarah Vap
    978-0-698-40735-0
    $7.99 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jan 26, 2016
  • It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful
    It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful
    Lia Purpura
    978-0-14-312690-4
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 29, 2015
  • Scattered at Sea
    Scattered at Sea
    Amy Gerstler
    978-0-14-312689-8
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    May 26, 2015
  • Dark Energy
    Dark Energy
    Poems
    Robert Morgan
    978-0-14-312806-9
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    May 26, 2015
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    Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy
    Joanna Klink
    978-0-14-312687-4
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 31, 2015
  • How to Be Drawn
    How to Be Drawn
    Terrance Hayes
    978-0-14-312688-1
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 31, 2015
  • Instant Winner
    Instant Winner
    Poems
    Carrie Fountain
    978-0-14-312663-8
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 30, 2014
  • The Second Sex
    The Second Sex
    Michael Robbins
    978-0-14-312664-5
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 30, 2014
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    Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
    Patricia Lockwood
    978-0-14-312652-2
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    Penguin Books
    May 27, 2014
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    Its Day Being Gone
    Rose McLarney
    978-0-14-312657-7
    $20.00 US
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    May 27, 2014
  • Another Reason
    Another Reason
    Carl Dennis
    978-0-14-312522-8
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 25, 2014
  • The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
    The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
    Poems
    Willie Perdomo
    978-0-14-312523-5
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 25, 2014
  • Holy Heathen Rhapsody
    Holy Heathen Rhapsody
    Pattiann Rogers
    978-0-14-312388-0
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 24, 2013
  • Under the Sign
    Under the Sign
    Ann Lauterbach
    978-0-14-312418-4
    $22.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 24, 2013
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    The Narrow Circle
    Nathan Hoks
    978-1-101-61309-2
    $11.99 US
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    The Big Smoke
    Adrian Matejka
    978-0-14-312372-9
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    May 28, 2013
  • Gossamurmur
    Gossamurmur
    Anne Waldman
    978-0-14-312308-8
    $22.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Apr 30, 2013
  • Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems
    Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems
    Robert Wrigley
    978-0-14-312307-1
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 26, 2013
  • My Favorite Warlord
    My Favorite Warlord
    Eugene Gloria
    978-0-14-312140-4
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    May 29, 2012
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    Alien vs. Predator
    Michael Robbins
    978-0-14-312035-3
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    Mar 27, 2012
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    The Middle Ages
    Roger Fanning
    978-1-101-57725-7
    $7.99 US
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    Terroir
    Robert Morgan
    978-1-101-55263-6
    $11.99 US
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    Sep 27, 2011
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    Absentia
    William Stobb
    978-1-101-55269-8
    $11.99 US
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    Twin Cities
    Carol Muske-Dukes
    978-0-14-311964-7
    $18.00 US
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  • The Lifting Dress
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    Lauren Berry
    978-1-101-52876-1
    $10.99 US
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  • The Broken Word
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    An Epic Poem of the British Empire in Kenya, and the Mau Mau Uprising Against It
    Adam Foulds
    978-0-14-311809-1
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 29, 2011
  • Culture of One
    Culture of One
    Alice Notley
    978-0-14-311893-0
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 29, 2011
  • Beautiful Country
    Beautiful Country
    Robert Wrigley
    978-0-14-311837-4
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 28, 2010
  • Callings
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    Carl Dennis
    978-1-101-46236-2
    $12.99 US
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    Sep 28, 2010
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    Carrie Fountain
    978-0-14-311771-1
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    May 25, 2010
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    Joanna Klink
    978-0-14-311772-8
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    May 25, 2010
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    Poems
    Terrance Hayes
    978-0-14-311696-7
    $19.00 US
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    Mar 30, 2010
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    Barbara Ras
    978-0-14-311697-4
    $20.00 US
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    Dearest Creature
    Amy Gerstler
    978-0-14-311635-6
    $20.00 US
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    Sep 29, 2009
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    Alison Hawthorne Deming
    978-0-14-311636-3
    $20.00 US
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    Sep 29, 2009
  • Mixology
    Mixology
    Adrian Matejka
    978-0-14-311583-0
    $18.00 US
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    May 26, 2009
  • The History of Forgetting
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    $11.99 US
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    May 26, 2009
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    Or to Begin Again
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    978-0-14-311520-5
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
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    $20.00 US
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    $9.99 US
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    $16.00 US
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    Apr 29, 2008
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