“Owed is an indictment of the state even as it is an ode to the ongoingness of Black imagination. 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 

“We’re lucky to have Joshua Bennett’s Owed at this hour in America. The resonances of ‘ode’ and ‘owed’ underscore his tremendous acts of invention amid ‘an ever-expanding grand Black Epilogue.’ Lyrical and political fibers are woven through narratives as clear and idiosyncratic as the plastic on your grandmother’s couch. Owed fights for the ‘ground where the children can play & come home whole.’ Bennett swings with song and exaltation; he swings with resistance and defense. I’m glad to have his amazing collection right now. I will be glad to have it tomorrow.” —Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

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Joshua Bennett is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth. He is the author of three books of poetry and criticism: The Sobbing School(Penguin, 2016)—winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Owed (Penguin, 2020), and Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, director, and educator. He is the author of “STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC.” and “Tertulia.” His work has been published in dozens of magazines and journals, including Washington Square, BOAAT, Rattle, Vinyl, The Acentos Review, The Buenos Aires Review, Chiricu Journal of Latino/a Literatures, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext.  Vincent is director of the Saturday Program at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a professor of English at Bronx Community College, a Dodge Foundation poet, and is a contributing editor at Kweli Literary Journal.

Joshua Bennett on Owed with Vincent Toro