Owed

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Owed written and read by Joshua Bennett.

From a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient, a 'rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the US' (New Yorker)

Selected as a book of the year by the Telegraph

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Owed is a book with celebration at its centre. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care.

Spanning the spectrum of genre and form – from elegy and ode to origin myth—these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair. What's more, they ask that we turn to the songs and sites of the historically denigrated so that we might uncover a new way of being in the world together, one wherein we can truthfully reckon with the brutality of the past and thus imagine the possibilities of our shared, unpredictable present, anew.

Critics Review

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
Odes to intimacy and his African-American com­munity ... Bennett has a sharp turn of phrase, too
Telegraph, Best poetry books of 2023
Themes of praise and debt pervade this rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the US ... 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'
New Yorker
We’re lucky to have Joshua Bennett’s Owed at this hour in America. The resonances of ‘ode’ and ‘owed’ underscore his tremendous acts of invention amid ‘an ever-expanding grand Black Epilogue.’ Lyrical and political fibers are woven through narratives as clear and idiosyncratic as the plastic on your grandmother’s couch. Owed fights for the ‘ground where the children can play & come home whole.’ Bennett swings with song and exaltation; he swings with resistance and defense. I’m glad to have his amazing collection right now. I will be glad to have it tomorrow
Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Owed is an indictment of the state even as it is an ode to the ongoingness of Black imagination. Here, a single moment shimmers with a million resonances of attention. So the world is loved this much. And what has been taken has been taken this much. Bennett insists on repair even as he mourns what is utterly irreparable. This book is part of a breathful, bodied fight for Black life. I am emboldened and sharpened by Bennett's genius and by his love made plain across each of these shimmering pages
Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
Astonishing poems that explore the past, childhood, family relationships, identity, and memory among many other themes, all expertly rendered through a mixture of forms ... Bennett has a gift for building and setting vivid scenes and complex stories within the small frames of his stanzas
Booklist
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)
The poems here give a new solidity and depth to his musings on identity, nostalgia and memory while losing none of the dynamism of his debut
TLS

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