Working the Roots

When I think of the kind of writing that really moves me, I think of the elements present in Bennett's poetry: honesty about Black women's interior lives, clarity (because we don't have time to talk around a thing), and a mean metaphor. Amanda Bennett has written a poetry collection squarely rooted in the legacy of Black feminists like Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and June Jordan: this is my favorite kind of poetry. The feeling present in these poems welcomes you in to experience the world as the writer does, where "black is a place we carry" and "difficult women are like dynamite." Working the Roots is a book everyone should read, if for no other reason than we all need a little vulnerability to survive this world, and each other. -Ariana Brown, author of We Are Owed.

About the Author :
Dr. Amanda Bennett (she/her) is a poet, cultural critic, and conjurer of queer Black feminist futures, raised by the South and rooted in Atlanta. Her work-grounded in spirit, theory, and survival-has appeared in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Murder Journal, Triangle Poetry 2021, and Feminist Making, Sensing, and Doing. She is the founder of define&empower, a collective and consultancy dedicated to worldmaking through education at the intersections of identity, imagination, and justice. Her Substack, Woo in the Real World, is an altar of essays and invocations where spirituality meets scholarship.Bennett holds a PhD in Literature and Cultural Studies from Duke University, where she created zines with students, facilitated poetry workshops, and led Black feminism reading groups that bridged the classroom and community. Her writing is an offering-tender, insurgent, and always reaching toward liberation, love, and the sacred in the everyday.

Review :
Bennett's Working the Root propels readers into the visceral materiality of our lives, as she implores that we not only observe but celebrate the complexities of our existences. Bennett's speaker "recreates the story of [the] body" in poems that explore self-love's intersection with desire, grief, and the power to create. As these poems cascade into each other, blood is the ligature, the life force, the root that binds them together. I will continue to return to these poems for not only their vitality but their viscosity-the way they stick with me.-Chet'la Sebree, author of Blue OpeningIn the poem, "Denial", Bennett writes: "And I am no conjure / woman / yet." but it is far from the truth. Working the Roots is an altar that summons even the shyest of ancestors, both living and deceased, to come and rest their weary spirits. It is a spiritual offering that sacrifices the blood born of loss, grief, intimacy, relationship, and Blackness. Anyone who has the opportunity to touch these pages and read these words should know they are encountering holy land-revere it as such.-Najya Williams, author of ON A DATE WITH DISAPPOINTMENT