in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. He is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)-which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award- Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Owed (Penguin, 2020). He doesn't know what else he can do with his hands.Joshua Bennett is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. There are men he destroyed to become this man. At a certain point, it all comes back to survival, is what I'm saying. And who would have thought to thank him then? Or else turn & expunge the record, given all we know now of war & and its unquantifiable cost, the way living through everyone around you dying kills something elemental, ancient.
But come winter time, he would wash & cocoa butter us until our curls shone like lodestone, bodies wrapped in three layers of cloth just to keep December's iron bite at bay. Both burden & blessing alike, it seemed, this beauty he carried like a dead doe. Never once have I prayed & had another man's wife wail in return. I have half my father's face & not a measure of his flair for the dramatic.
Even then, I knew the link between me & the old man was pure negation, bad habits, some awful hyphen filled with blood. Just like your father, she said, whenever I would lie or otherwise warp the historical record to get my way. As a boy, my mother made me write & sign contracts to express the worthlessness of a man's word. The ledger said three out of every four of us was destined for a cell or lead shells flitting like comets through our heads. All the men I loved were dead -beats by birthright or so the legend went.
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