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**Winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize** **L onglisted for the Griffin Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award** **Soon to be adapted for screen by Lena Waithe and Warner Bros.** An award-winning collection and novella exploring the realm of speculative fiction, while addressing issues as varied as abolition, Black ecological consciousness, and the boundless promise of parenthood 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. Praise for Joshua Bennett ''One of the brightest intellectual and political thinkers of a new generation'' Jesse McCarthy ''Bennett conjures a spirit of kinship that, illuminated by redolent imagery, borders on mythic'' New Yorker ''Joshua Bennett''s astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable'' Tracy K Smith
About the author
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.
