Winner of the Poetry Category OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2022.
An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021.
A White Review Book of the Year 2021.
Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in a village in central Jamaica. 'Trees were all around,' he writes, 'we often went to the yam ground, my grandmother's cultivation plot. When I think of my childhood, I see myself entering a deep woodland with cedars and logwood all around. [...] The muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived.'
Now he lives in Leeds, near a forest where he goes walking. 'Here, trees represent an alternative space, a refuge from an ultra-consumerist culture...' And even as they help him recover his connections with nature, these poems are inevitably political.
As Malika Booker writes, 'Allen-Paisant's poetic ruminations deceptively radicalise Wordsworth's pastoral scenic daffodils. The collection racializes contemporary ecological poetics and its power lies in Allen-Paisant's subtle destabilization of the ordinary dog walker's right to space, territory, property and leisure by positioning the colonised Black male body's complicated and unsafe reality in these spaces.'
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Thinking with Trees 9781800171138 Paperback
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- Year Published:
- 2021
- Country of Publication:
- United Kingdom
- Format:
- Paperback
- ISBN:
- 9781800171138
- Number of Pages:
- 120
- Publication Date:
- 24/06/2021
- Publisher:
- Carcanet Press Ltd
- Place of Publication:
- Manchester
- Authors:
- Allen-Paisant, Jason
- Publication Date:
- 24/06/2021
- SKU:
- 9781800171138