Owed — 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 US' (New Yorker)

Owed is a book with celebration at its centre. 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.