The Study of Human Life

Winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize
Longlisted 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 presents 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