The Sobbing School

Starred review from November 7, 2016
In his scintillating debut, Bennett, a performance poet and 2015 National Poetry Series winner, raises a crucial question about the writing of African-American experience: how can one convey the enormity of black suffering without reducing black life and expression to elegy? Bennett writes, “when I consider extinction,/ I do not think of sad men with guns,” but instead “of our refusal.” Bennett’s poems resist conventional narratives and lyric expectations, riffing on personal and cultural history instead of directly telling a story. “I know/ the respectable man enjoys a dark/ body best when it comes with a good/ cry thrown in,” Bennett writes in the book’s opener, a skillful meditation on the performance and consumption of pain. Another poem, “Yoke,” uses the poet’s family tree to connect Jim Crow–era farming to mass incarceration. Others render his background from surprising angles or in ingenious forms. Two pieces are presented as academic paper abstracts, another adopts the perspective of a cockroach, and “In Defense of Passing” explores the persistent ironies of coloration through science fiction. At its heart, Bennett’s sharp collection is an ode to family, friendship, and culture that neither pulls punches nor withholds sentiment: “despair kills: too slow to cut/ the music from a horn, or set/ my nephew’s laughter to dim.”

Starred review from October 15, 2016

Though he does well by debuting with a National Poetry Series winner, Bennett is already well known from the video of his performance for the Obamas at the White House Poetry Jam, which has claimed almost 400,000 views on YouTube. His opening poem, addressed to an escaped slave Henry Box Brown, has Brown performing in "sold out/ shows an ocean away from the place/ that made you possible." Throughout, Bennett clarifies what made him possible, moving from strict Baptist parents who "praise a vengeful god," to school bullies and best friends, to considerations of blackness couched in language both pop culture and high culture. Delivered without showiness, his imagery is indeed arresting; Richard Wright starts a fire "just to see cinder blacken/ his father's hands like the insides of a loganberry pie." VERDICT Highly recommended.

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