A review by snowmaiden
The Sobbing School by Joshua Bennett

4.0

It's rare to see a book of poems (and especially a first collection) published by one of the big five publishers, so when I found out this book was from Penguin, I was expecting big things. It did not disappoint. What impresses me about Bennett's work is that there are many different kinds of poems represented here, but they all seem unified in voice. As one would expect in a book about the "black experience" (as it says on the back cover), there are narrative poems about Bennett's growing-up years. There are also lyric poems on a variety of topics. These are good examples of those forms, but what really impressed me are the types of poems that he seems to have invented for himself. There are a series of poems disguised as academic proposals. (It's obvious that Bennett has spent a lot of time in academia, as he gets the form just right.) There's a series of triptychs where he explores three different meanings of the same word. ("Yoke," "Run," and "Fly," to name just a few.) There's even a poem that consists of a title and a footnote with no body. All of Bennett's explorations of form are clever and fitting with the subject matter, and one never gets the idea that he's playing with form because of a lack of compelling content.

I'm very glad that I read this book (my first ever poetry book won through a Goodreads giveaway), and I look forward to seeing more work from Bennett in the future.