Description
About the Author
Jason Allen-Paisant is from a village called Coffee Grove in Manchester, Jamaica. At present, he's a lecturer in Caribbean Poetry & Decolonial Thought in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where he's also the Director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He serves on the editorial board of Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters. He holds a doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford, and he speaks seven languages. He lives in Leeds.
Reviews
'Jason Allen-Paisant deftly inscribes his own signature on worlds inner and outer in these gorgeous poems. The future of Caribbean lyric poetry is in great hands.' - Lorna Goodison; 'These observant poems lay their burdens down by the rivers of Babylon and try to sing the Lord's song in a strange land. What might it mean for the black body to experience nature, not as labour, but as leisure? What might it mean to simply walk through a park and observe the birds and the trees? These poems are beautiful and gentle, but the questions they raise are difficult and important.' - Kei Miller; 'In these quietly subversive lyrics, expectations are undone, of ecologies, of people, of poems.' - Rachael Allen; 'The power of this expansive, original book is in its attention to the ways in which a sense of leisure, territory and belonging is an implicit, racialised underpinning in the long tradition of nature writing ... Thinking with Trees is an expansive, fracturing, subversive book.' - Sean Hewitt, The Irish Times; 'The poet scrupulously decouples nature from any sense of private ownership, opening himself up to more generous, alternative worldviews. This is a bold and impressive debut.' - David Wheatley, Guardian Review Roundup; 'Allen-Paisant has penned a debut that may be years ahead of its time.' - Anthony Anaxagorou; '[A] remarkable debut poetry collection [...] Gently, beautifully, unsettlingly about race, nature, naming, access, green-ness...and, yes, trees & forests. This is going to be a book I return to, teach with, learn from.' - Robert Macfarlane
Awards
Winner of The Poetry Category OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2022. Short-listed for The Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023.
Book Information
ISBN 9781800171138
Author Jason Allen-Paisant
Format Paperback
Page Count 120
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 135mm * 10mm