Owed

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 U.S.” ( The New Yorker )

Gregory Pardlo described Joshua Bennett's first collection of poetry, The Sobbing School , as an "arresting debut" that was "abounding in tenderness and rich with character," with a "virtuosic kind of code switching." Bennett's new collection, Owed , is a book with celebration at its center. 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.

Genres: Poetry, African American, Nonfiction, Contemporary, The United States Of America, Social Justice

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2020

About the author

Joshua Bennett received his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. He also holds an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. In 2010, he delivered the Commencement Address at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with the distinctions of Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude.

Winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series, Dr. Bennett has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Cave Canem, the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, and the Ford Foundation. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Poetry and elsewhere. He has recited his original work at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at The White House. He is currently a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Raymond · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite poems in this collection include: "Token Sings the Blues", "Barber Song", "Owed to the Durag", "Owed to the 99 Cent Store", and "Frederick Douglass Is Dead".

One of my favorite lines:
"Caesar
never meant anything to me
but a cut so close you could see
the shimmer of a man's thinking"
-from "Barber Song"

This interview with the author inspired me to read this book: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Owed was the fourteenth book in my October poetry project and Joshua Bennett is one of our best contemporary poets, formally inventive and emotionally moving all at once. I recommend this one and also his earlier collection The Sobbing School.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t really know how to rate a book of poetry, but, honestly, this is so good. Please read it, annotate it, read it aloud to your friends and family.

[Sally Elhennawy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need everyone ever to read this book WOW I love poetry and Joshua Bennett is a deeply gifted artist!!!

[BookishVegan]

Def going to check this out as an ebook

Very good
Audio made me drift off a little

[Shell (booksbythecup)]

Thank you Penguin Random House for gifted book.

Reading 'Elegy for the Modern School'  in OWED by Joshua Bennett, made the saying I have heard at different times in my life, sound like the testing of the EMERGENCY broadcast system.  Does anyone remember those?

As each year passes & I expand my reading, the range of understanding increases & I understand more about my upbringing.  More about the upbringing of my parents & grandparents & great grandparents.
 
The saying:  “I brought you into this world & I will take you out of it.”  HARD STOP.  Pause, ponder, process = more understanding, clarity & empathy. 

Pondering why as a Black child growing up, getting a whuppin' (spanking) was not something I heard my non Black friends talk about. 

To ponder WHY Black parents, my grandmother, disciplined with an iron fist (leather belt or switch if you are from the South).

So many things I have read & seen in the world, bringing sharply into focus that discipline was based on fear of what could happen—a child being rundown by a mob, beaten or killed.  More than fears, because sadly today, those fears are ever present realities.

There are moments of laughter and joy: 'Owed to the Plastic on Your Grandmother's Couch', moments of clarity about the complexity of who we are as individuals in 'Plural.'

Aracelis Girmay says about OWED, “Bennett's genius and love are made plain across each of these shimmering pages.”

🖤 O is for OWED #SteepedInBlackLitfromAtoZ

#SteepedInPoetry

[Lydia · Rating 5 out of 5]

very pleased that this has an average rating it deserves, it's a beautiful book. Used to follow Joshua Bennett way back when he was in The Strivers Row and spoken word was popping on Youtube (truly an iconic era), so was very excited to see he published something. You never know how poetry will translate on the page but this lived up to the hype
He captured something really special about blackness and boyhood, without catering to the white gaze. Refreshing and will resonate with Black readers. Really no bad poems here, executed very thoughtfully. Will come back to this one.

[literaryelise · Rating 5 out of 5]

just finished my reread of this collection. I love it so much.

“if evolution were kind we’d all be fire proof by now”

“throat now full of my own, unoriginal blood”

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

MIKE BROWN IS A TYPE OF CHRIST

By which I mean, mostly, that we gaze upon the boy
& all of our fallen return to us, their wounds unhealed
& howling. I want to say something about indeterminacy
here. Decomposition as a kind of writing.
How the body never vanishes, really,
merely sketches the landscape anew
underground, foxgloves & marigolds jutting
like scimitars from the field's flesh,
precious weapons of those thought to be rot
already, soil's song, long gone past the grave.
For who says the dead don't think, don't shake
the weight of marrow & slip, quiet as fire, back
into whatever partition binds this life
to its grand black Epilogue? Last night,
I imagined every officer's gun
gathered & stuffed in a bombproof box
by the side of the highway; wondered
what they might choose to craft
with their hands, their eyes, both given
for so long to the work of chasing
what can't be contained. I dreamt unkillable
multitudes assembled in the wake
of a slain friend, the name
his mother once cast
like a cloak over him
the small & common blade
beneath their tongues.

In his collection Owed, Joshua Bennett is a gifted and provocative poet capable of capturing his experiences and visions in verse of startling quality. His content and his form are meshed inextricably so that his emotion and frustration ring with clarity and direction. This is a engaging, engrossing collection I highly recommend to anyone interested in the power of contemporary poetry. I will certainly read his first collection The Sobbing School and other collections as they are published.

Highly recommended.

OWED TO THE CHEESE BUS

O, how we gave chase
on legs that bent like Air
-heads under front teeth
or early summer's graceless

gaze. The back seats that loved us
back. Our bodies flush
against their sticky green
leather glory once heat

was high enough for hydrants
to bloom: block boys molted
swagger, gathered laughing
to see red & yellow metal

croon cool. It was you
who taught uncute kids
the breaks, their hearts to flex
with pluck & pomp, re-spawn

when Valentine's Day cards
went unopened, when jewelry
stolen from Mom
& given to Melissa was worn

to homecoming with Jordan
who was an inch taller
than he should have been
& a mediocre chess player.

Who else could defang the shame
but you, great muse of Morlock
youth, patron saint
of the thirteen-yet-still-juice-box

-bearing multitudes?
Mom's Volvo? Quotidian
by comparison. They call you
yellow. I call you off-gold

chariot. Haven for homework
forgotten at home or forgone
altogether. Truth is, we all together
like this nowhere but here.

You wrought us. You drop us
off but never drop us. Even
when drivers threaten
to call the law,

or actually carry through
with such a pitiful joke
& we drop down for fear
of turning to smoke, you stay.

Your floors may be filthy, but they
are solid as a full life & we are young.
& quicksilver tongued. & learning
words like inertia for the first time.

[Emily]

"You don't know why
You apologize to no one
in particular just for being around
& in your body at the same time"
-Token Sings the Blues

I also loved "Summer Job," "The Next Black National Anthem," and the "Owed" poems (a twist on the "ode").

"If evolution were kind,

we would all be fireproof
by now."
-Token Comes Clean

[Roxie]

No. 04 - #10BooksByBlackMen (2023)

[madison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an *excellent* contemporary poetry collection. I loved it all. Many of the poems are odes to objects and places like the durag, the plastic on your grandma's couch, the school bus, the barbershop. The collection is an ode to Blackness in America, weaving together images, stories, memories about family, friends, growing up, politics post-Ferguson and post-2016. These poems have heart and soul and passion. It feels silly to say because it's so obvious, but Joshua Bennett is a master with words. I could sit in his head ALL DAY and was sad when I finished reading because I could have kept going.

Highly recommended for lovers of poetry. I'll read anything Joshua Bennett feels generous enough to share with us in the future.

Thanks to #NetGalley and Penguin Books for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Jalisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm committing to reading more of the backlist books that have been on my shelf since the pandemic.

I have heard Joshua Bennett perform spoken word live in Philly and have been wanting to get to his collection. I'm not big on poetry but he has an exceptional ability to create beauty with the mundane and discarded. His poetry is meant to read out loud and hear in the room with you.

Playing on the words "ode" and "owed" Joshua Bennett toys with the notion of inheritance, a generational debt. Who owes what to whom? What does he owe to the denigrated people and places that raised him? What does this country owe Black people?

From the streets that raised him, to the ivy League institutions and surveillance society built to break him and other Black and brown people Joshua shines a light on what is owed, requires repair, and what is still hoped for in the bloody American experiment.

[Sierra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrically beautiful. Each word was selected with absolute care, and the last poem was particularly powerful. I was going to share my favorite lines but that ended up being the entire thing.
I listened to the audiobook version and it took me about halfway through the reading to realize that the section titles were “owed to” not “ode to”, which is so clever (you’d think I’d realize this sooner with “owed” being the title, but alas, my brain just didn’t make the connection). I need to get a print copy, but I enjoyed the audiobook.

[Rewon · Rating 5 out of 5]

moving prose, depicting quickly flicking images. describes what was true and hard in his life and sets it up against every stereotype and prejudice that exists in people's minds.
beautiful odes written about centerpieces of his childhood, telling the story of the black community through specific figures and objects.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

A radiant and devastating rhapsody. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

“…our entire family
gathered as if shrapnel in the living
room, so close our bodies grew almost
indeterminate there, huddled like stars
under blankets to thaw”

“…He looks
at me like the promise of another cosmos & I never
know what to tell him.”

[Scott Stelter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful word play

[Tiffany]

An abundance.

[Tom Wein · Rating 4 out of 5]

To themes of young Black American life that might risk being archetypal, Bennett continually brings particularity and softness. A book full of good poems.

[Ayesha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intense, fierce and challenging collection of poetry.

[Jamie Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing read, love the different outlooks

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely Precious.

[Dina H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I am learning to participate in the world"

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slightly different published version: https://artsfuse.org/215913/poetry-re...

After Joshua Bennett’s assured debut collection The Sobbing School won a National Poetry Prize, the scholar/performer/teacher has established himself as a one of America’s leading poets. Owed, his second collection, continues and extends this preeminence via his virtuosic technical skill, subtle wit, and a cinematographic eye and ear for detail that imbues his poems with a vibrance as rare as it is vivid.

The titular pun deftly switches around the term to suggest inheritance rather than merely a formal declaration. Bennett’s odes are about what he owes to the everyday things of the world that created him—the dollar store, his father’s gold chain, the plastic on his grandmother’s couch, the second skin of long johns, the amusingly gritty summer job, the doo-rag (which he wittily rechristens “the durag”) and to the more abstract concepts that nurtured his imagination, such as family, race, history, education, politics, and the subversive melody of lyrical poetry.

In the “The Book of Mycah”, one of the more condensed narrative poems, we see the random violence inflicted on neighborhood kids from his NYC childhood as a kind of compressed short film. The “son of Marvin of Tallulah” is “maroon-clad from head to foot like an homage to blood…high-top Chuck Taylors, size 12, sounding like ox hooves” interferes in a street brawl on his cousin’s behalf only to have policemen’s ammo enter him “mid-stride, lifted his six-foot frame from the ground, legs still pumping” and this agonizing memory is described with all the breathless veracity of documentary film.

The stories these poems have to tell aren’t always pretty. Every exquisitely crafted line is fully aware of the pull that the gravitational force of history has on our dire political situation. There are moments of transcendence that appear due to his ability to turn the raw pulp of life into poetry is proven in one nimble but incisive poem after another. In multiple poems titled “Reparation” he wittily dissects the urgency and impossibility of such a thing. “Monuments to the fallen” are proposed along with scholarships as well “scholars that love us/ enough to break this language/ lengthwise, filled as it is/ with the bones of our fallen.” Ultimately, these poems understand that the most durable form of reparations is the rejuvenation that comes from the “ground/ where the children can play/ & come home whole.”

Maybe learning the power of words as a social survival gesture gave him an edge early on. In “Token Plays The Dozens” he describes how the cliché about swapping yo’ mama jokes give him a little bit of pride “against a host of boys more beautiful than I & better dressed too” but his ability to talk eloquent shit came from a perhaps unlikely source: “the blades between each molar honed at home watching my mother use her most/ luxurious words to pummel the man she loved into powder.”

Amid all the daily struggles to survive and thrive Bennett’s deepest preoccupations are with his family. “So much has been said/ about black men/ & their mothers,/ Almost none of which works for you & me…I am your twin brother/ of a sort, counterfeit currency/ moving through the world/ on your behalf, making things/move.” Bennett’s commitment to the honesty and style of his voice is as powerful as his commitment to the people who raised him. “We live/ in a country/with no language/ for what you are,/ & I persist/ for the sake/of your glory.” This is an ode about what’s owed, and in awe of that inspiration.

In the final poem of the collection “America Will Be” Bennett mediates on his father’s story, who grew up in Alabama as one of ten children, “side by side in the kitchen each morning like a pair of hands exalting.” When he asks him about the hardest part of going to school back then, his father doesn’t bother to mention the attack dogs, Bull Connor’s tank, or getting stabbed with pens in the hallway. Instead, he stoically says that it was eating lunch alone. Considering the horror of that past, and the fortitude it took to bear it, the present doesn’t necessarily look that steady, either. “He looks/ at me like the promise of another cosmos & I never know what to tell him.”

Even though Bennett’s poems don’t shy away from precisely describing the world as it is, they remember how and when to offer a moment of grace. After describing what his father had to go through in his time, pondering an America that did and still does allow these kinds of injustices to arrive as steadily as the morning news, there is a powerful note of redemption at the end which comes through just as unmistakably as all that came before: “loud as the sound of my father’s/unfettered laughter over cheese eggs & coffee/ his eyes shut tight as armories his fists/ unclenched as if he were invincible.” He’s not, because no one is, but these poems might well be. And that’s a debt that we can be glad that Bennett has repaid in full.

[Mya Matteo · Rating 4 out of 5]

oof.

[alphea 🪷 · Rating 4 out of 5]

he looks at me like the promise of another cosmos & i never know what to tell him.

[Alisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful and incredibly well thought-out. My favorites were "American Abecedarian" and "Owed to the 99 Cent Store". Throughout this collection there is an ongoing pun of owed/ode that plays out in some interesting ways.

[Laura Medicus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful. Beautiful. I can’t wait to read this again and again.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful collection of poetry. From the opening piece "Token Sings the Blues", the collection invites us to feel the perspective of someone othered, isolated, and alone in rooms full of people, in everyday situations...a perspective that will resonate with many people of color. What follows is a collection of astonishing poems that explore the past, childhood, family relationships, identity, and memory among many other themes. Bennett has a gift for setting a vivid scene throughout his stanzas, building a rich scene within such a small frame that I often felt like I was reading a full story. The imagery is beautiful, often startling. Among many other standout images:
"Consider the garden
of collards & heirloom
tomatoes only,
her long, single braid
streaked with gray
like a gathering
of weather" -- from "Owed to the Plastic on Your Grandmother's Couch"

Bennett also uses wordplay throughout the collection (owed/ode) in an effective, never forced way. Overall the meditations, nostalgia, voice, and characters within this rich collection are near perfect. Recommended to fans of Gregory Pardlo, those who appreciate wordplay in their poetry, and anyone who wants to experience a collection of incredible poems.

[Misse Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ode to OWED!
Owed is a representation of the triumph that is black boyhood and blackness in general. Even when the perils of life are at every turn, Joshua Bennett creates in verse a masterfully crafted collection that will inspire and warm hearts as it did my own.

With poems like “Owed to the Cheese Bus”, “Owed to the High Top Fade”, “The Book of Mycah”, and “Still Life With a Toy Gun”, Bennett gives voice to the unheard, overlooked and often unappreciated. His work is timely and meaningful. He has such a way with words that I read many of the poems here a second and third time! Peak nostalgia joy.

Poetry readers and book lovers alike will enjoy this installation. Easily 5 stars. I am now looking forward to going back and reading “The Sobbing School.”