The Sobbing School, Joshua Bennett's mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett's own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation toward the end of claiming that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternate ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries