Working the Roots
Published on 11. July 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
30 pages
978-1-963943-43-6 (ISBN)
Description
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.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 3 mm
Weight
61 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-963943-43-6 (9781963943436)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
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.