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    The Study of Human Life
    The Study of Human Life
    The Study of Human Life
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    The Study of Human Life

    By Joshua Bennett

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the Griffin Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Books
    Release dateSep 20, 2022
    ISBN9780525508328
    Author

    Joshua Bennett

    Dr. 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) and Spoken Word: A Cultural History, which is forthcoming from Knopf. 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.

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      Book preview

      The Study of Human Life - Joshua Bennett

      Cover for The Study of Human Life, Author, Joshua Bennett

      ALSO BY JOSHUA BENNETT

      POETRY

      The Sobbing School

      Owed

      NONFICTION

      Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man

      Spoken Word: A Cultural History

      Book Title, The Study of Human Life, Author, Joshua Bennett, Imprint, Penguin Books

      PENGUIN BOOKS

      An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

      penguinrandomhouse.com

      Copyright © 2022 by Joshua Bennett

      Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

      Sunday Afternoon from Magic City © 1992 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission.

      This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

      library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

      Names: Bennett, Joshua (Poet), author.

      Title: The study of human life / Joshua Bennett.

      Description: [New York] : Penguin Books, [2022] | Series: Penguin poets Identifiers: LCCN 2022006597 | ISBN 9780143136828 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780525508328 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. | Poetry.

      Classification: LCC PS3602.E664483 S78 2022 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220224

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006597

      Cover design: Lynn Buckley

      Cover photograph: Justin Hardiman

      Designed by Alexis Farabaugh, adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed

      pid_prh_6.0_148350563_c0_r0

      for my family

      Acknowledgments

      Sincerest thanks to the following journals for publishing earlier versions of the work featured in this collection:

      Academy of American Poets: Dad Poem (Ultrasound #2)

      Colorado Review: Dad Poem (We play Cam’Ron at eleven) and Trash (The Knicks were trash)

      The Kenyon Review: Trash (All the men I loved were dead)

      Poetry: The Book of Mycah

      Poetry Daily: Trash (All the men I loved were dead)

      Puerto del Sol: Trash (Saturdays, it was my job to pick the bones)

      The Southern Review: Trash (Abolition), Trash (I bought a house by the trees), and Trash (The American Negro is an invention)

      The Wall Street Journal: Dad Poem (No visitors allowed)

      The Yale Review: Dad Poem (The New Temporality) and Dad Poem (Your doula’s name is Perpetual)

      Thank you to the family that raised me: my late grandmother, Charlotte Elizabeth Ballard; my aunts and uncles; my big sister; and my mother and father, who taught me that strength was inextricably tied to gentleness. That poems, like all good things, were meant to be shared.

      Thank you to my editor, Paul Slovak, for his keen eye and willingness to try something new with me every time we put one of these together. Thank you to my Langston’s Legacy family for workshopping several of the poems in this manuscript in their earliest forms: Andrea Bossi, Danielle Georges, Florence Ladd, Gavin Moses, and Patrick Sylvain. Thank you to my friends, mentors, colleagues, and collaborators, for your calls, your work, your camaraderie and laughter, especially during these harrowing last couple of years: Thomas Alston, Charlotte Bacon, Jamil Baldwin, Cory Benjamin, Everett Aaron Benjamin, Kyle Brooks, Jamall Calloway, Devin Chamberlain, Daniel Claro, Ben Crossan, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Mary C. Fuller, Aracelis Girmay, Jarvis Givens, Bill Gleason, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Terrance Hayes, R.A. Judy, Susan Lambe-Sariñana, Carvens Lissaint, Jesse McCarthy, Roshad Meeks, Ernie Mitchell, Wesley Morris, Timothy Pantoja, Gregory Pardlo, Imani Perry, Samora Pinderhughes, Elaine Scarry, Christina Sharpe, Tracy K. Smith, Josef Sorett, Matthew Spellberg, Brandon Terry, Daniella Toosie-Watson, and Simone White.

      Thank you to the Whiting Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College for the various forms of institutional support that helped make this manuscript possible.

      And thank you to my wife and son, Pam and August Galileo: You are my life. Thank you for making each day miraculous.

      Contents

      TRASH

      THE BOOK OF MYCAH

      DAD POEM

      How do you provide for the Study of Human Life?

      —June Jordan

      Where life is precious, life is precious.

      —Ruth Wilson Gilmore

      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

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