We (the People of the United States)

“Bennett is showing out in the positive Black vernacular sense: demonstrating his erudition for shared delight with the reader … Bennett’s poetry combines structural elegance with taut rhythms harking back to his undergraduate days in the New York slam poetry scene … In layered metaphor, the text calls to mind the shifting hues of water, the colors of Civil War uniforms and the nation itself, with all its wrath and love and reaching. God bless America, indeed.” —The New York Times

“An ode to the America that was, is, and will be.” —The Boston Globe

“Bennett has now produced the most prophetic collection of political verse since Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018). We (The People of the United States) braids the personal and familial with the political and the cosmic… Any verse that entertains the possibility that how we live now need not be how we always live, must, in its particulars, be beautiful. On that score, Bennett achieves his aim. Though the poems in the collection are political, they are hardly didactic; in their very aesthetic, a politics of liberatory potential emerges.” —Poetry Foundation

“A dazzling, expansive exploration of personal experience and the touchstones that informed it in poems that examine national identity, parenthood, masculinity, popular culture, and the natural world… .Bennett’s clever wordplay, wit, and gift for setting the scene permeate the collection and immerse the reader in the journey with vivid clarity… .An essential addition to the American poetic canon.” —Booklist, starred review

“As much as it’s a triple-album-sized poetic performance of the word, Bennett’s book is also a history and theory of the American ‘we,’ across its myriad inflections—familial, romantic, local, congregational, coalitional, racial, transhistorical, even universal.” —Christopher Spaide, LitHub

Praise for Joshua Bennett

“Don’t miss this superb laying bare of Black joy and genius!” —Cornel West

“At a moment in American culture punctuated to a heartbreaking degree by acts of hatred, violence and disregard, I can think of nothing we need to ponder and to sing of more than our shared grief and our capacity not just for empathy but genuine love. Poetry is critical to such an endeavor—and Joshua Bennett’s astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable.” —Tracy K. Smith

“Here, a single moment shimmers with a million resonances of attention. So the world is loved this much. And what has been taken has been taken this much. Bennett insists on repair even as he mourns what is utterly irreparable. This book is part of a breathful, bodied fight for Black life. I am emboldened and sharpened by Bennett’s genius and by his love made plain across each of these shimmering pages.” —Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria

“With a singularly expansive and compassionate view of history, Bennett sweeps across generations of joy, suffering, and connection.” —Lit Hub

“A tender celebration of vulnerability and the strength that blooms quietly in its presence.” —The Atlantic

Dr. Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School (2016), which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is also the author of Being Property Once Myself (2020), Owed (2020), The Study of Human Life (2022), and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (2023). He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is a professor of literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT.

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