“The only working antidote I have found for spells where I struggle to write—the weeks and months where every poem seems to me some small, opaque machine, its inner workings altogether inscrutable—is to spend time with authors who unsettle my habits of analysis, especially at the level of genre convention. Christina Sharpe’s most recent monograph, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), has been a rare gift in this regard. The book is a masterclass on form, and a must-read for those of us committed to the beautiful sentence, as well as the work of what is commonly called theory. Phillip B. Williams’s Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016) is a devastating collection that operates along similar lines, and ultimately expands our vocabulary for thinking about the relationship between violence and intimacy, repulsion and desire. Finally, I have spent a good portion of the last few months reading and re-reading June Jordan’s prose, and ‘Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan’ might be my favorite essay in the world right now. Every time I return to it, I am reminded of the spaces that brought me to the page in earnest years ago: the poetry slams and Africana Studies classrooms where I first bore witness to the sheer breadth of this literary tradition I now call home and harbor. The way Jordan writes about pedagogy, and the importance of equipping our students to navigate a social and political milieu dead set against their most radical aspirations, always pushes me back into the writing. It takes me to task. It reminds me that there is an undeniable urgency to the work in times like these: a call not only to write, but to organize, to dream, in the face of that which seeks to curtail and constrain our very living.”
—Joshua Bennett, author of The Sobbing School (Penguin Books, 2016)
Photo credit: Rog Walker