Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023
Shortlisted for the Writers’ Prize 2024
The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2023
A Guardian and The Irish Times Book of the Year
Jason Allen-Paisants debut collection Thinking With Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry and was an Irish Times and White Review Book of the Year 2021. In Poetry London Maryam Hessavi wrote, Jason Allen-Paisant is uncompromising when digging down through the undergrowth of our imperialist past – and yet he succeeds in replanting new narratives in the same soil where these toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside.
The interlocking poems of his second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, imagine Othello in the urban landscapes of modern London, Paris and Venice and invent the kinds of narrative he might tell about his intersecting identities. Poetic memoir and ekphrastic experiment, Self-Portrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real. Othello here represents a structure of feeling that was emerging in seventeenth-century Venice, and is still with us.
Portraiting himself as Othello, Allen-Paisant refracts his European travels and considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressiveness and vulnerabilities. Othellos intertwined identities as immigrant and Black, which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and academic who works as a senior lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He’s the author of two poetry collections, Thinking with Trees (Carcanet Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry, and Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet Press, 2023). His non-fiction book, Scanning the Bush, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2024.
• His debut Thinking With Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry and was an Irish Times and White Review Book of the Year 2021 • This second collection imagines the Shakespearian character Othello for the contemporary age, in the urban landscapes of London, Paris, and indeed Venice and considered through the intertwining identities of ‘immigrant’ and ‘Black’ • Weaves a narrative that spans multiple geographies and languages • Senior lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester
Self-Portrait as Othello is a book with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair. As the title would suggest, the poetry is delivered with theatricality and in a range of voices and registers, across geographies and eras. It takes real nerve to pull off a work like this with such style and integrity. We are confident that Self-Portrait as Othello is a book to which readers will return for many years.
T.S. Eliot Prize Judges Paul Muldoon (Chair), Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul
Part I of Self-Portrait as Othello is a tour de force of language slippage in a journey from Jamaica to Paris (the allure of French and Europe, focalising later in the book around Venice). In a fusing of modes of irony and almost painful recollection, Allen-Paisant lets language suggest language, just as conditions suggest conditions... His method is to know language, remake it, call it out, shift into different streams of articulation.
John Kinsella, Poetry Society
Self-Portrait as Othello is a collection which explores narrative from all angles, how a story is told and who becomes the main character through this telling. Allen-Paisant disrupts time and space, and asks what may be left behind, and/or what stands outside the frame.
SK Grout, The Alchemy Spoon
Jason Allen-Paisants Self-Portrait as Othello whisks its readers along like a confident lead (there is much dancing-related imagery to enjoy throughout), offering rich descriptions, lingual agility, and poignant social criticism along the way.
Aaron Barry, World Literature Today
Jason Allen-Paisants second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, is an erudite and expansive reflection on how identity, political and artistic, is composed, consolidated and made fragile... There is a compelling, essayistic quality to these poems.
Stephen Sexton, Irish Times
Absolutely astonishing!... Self-portrait as Othello is a masterful second collection: part memoir, part self-invention, part lyrical interrogation of the self as "other". These poems force us to reconsider "the black male body", its presence and absence from the renaissance of Othello to present day migrants and the poets own experiences of crossing the cities of Europe... Full of geographical crossings and liminal spaces, these poems confront difficult truths, upend stereotypes and the limits of language itself...
Poetry Book SocietyThis indispensable collection explores Shakespeares pernicious archetype, observing how "the Moor remains invisible, despite the obsession with his body". Yet Allen-Paisant makes the historical impasse an occasion for deep, generous interrogation of masculinity, and a linked elevation of the maternal that is at the heart of so many Caribbean and other families... Enriched by historical research, Self-Portrait As Othello celebrates representation, understanding and speech as acts of glorious resistance.
Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
A rich and twisty linguistic collection that finely balances the inner and outer space of black embodiment... a fine, fine accomplishment.
Raymond AntrobusIn Jason Allen-Paisants Self-Portrait as Othello we take a deep dive not only into the formation of a literary self but also into a compelling narrative of the body and its visual history. Brilliantly insightful and strikingly lyrical, it accrues significant emotional heft in its movements from Othello to self and back. But underlying it all is a rich seam of commentary on Othellos subtexts that makes you constantly reconsider who might be the exploiter and who might be the exploited. Exhilarating - I recommend it highly.
Roger Robinson
Praise for Jason Allen-PaisantAllen-Paisant is uncompromising when digging down through the undergrowth of our imperialist past - and yet he succeeds in replanting new narratives in the same soil where these toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside.
Maryam Hessavi, Poetry London
Original, masterful, and beautiful ... invites us to think about a perpetual condition of marronage for the Caribbean writer.
Bocas 2022 Prize Judges, where Thinking with Trees was shortlisted
This is a collection that engages with the fluidity of form and rhythm, the poems spread out on the page like roots and leaves... this is a collection that moves the conversation into something much deeper, much richer, more contemplative and more pressing
SK Grout, The Alchemy Spoon
As he cuts a radical response to the pastoral in a Leeds forest where dogs are welcomed but black men are suspect, he echoes June Jordans 40-year-old question, "suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/ or far into the woods I wanted to go?"
Martina Evans, Irish Times Best Books of the Year 2021
Thinking with Trees has a narrative arc - it reads like a walking diary, though not signposted as such or always in order through the seasons.
Fiona Moore, The Friday Poem
To hear this new sound, one is invited to cross the threshold into something "accidental / so entire so free", away from an exclusive lyric past and beyond the inherited traumas of slave labour. This crossing, the speaker of poems like Black Walking informs us, is not only a physical passage but a leap over the precipice of racial asymmetry.
Mantra Mukim, The Poetry Review
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
A remarkable work... Its a stunning debut collection
Richard Price & Sally Price, Bookshelf 2021, New West Indian Guide
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
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
Jason Allen-Paisant maps a complex and multifaceted internal landscape in these astounding poems. How does the person occupy a poem? How does the poem speak back to a person? How does a poem then speak to the world?... Tough queries on language and personhood are posed through Paisants extraordinary line and sense of image; every poem seems a painting with their flashes of colour, their broad scope of place, the vivid characters of the people and animals who inhabit them. In these quietly subversive lyrics, expectations are undone, of ecologies, of people, of poems: trees, dogs, thoughts, cells, the daily world here is rendered wholly new.
Rachael Allen
Allen-Paisants poetic ruminations deceptively radicalise Wordsworths pastoral scenic daffodils; here the body is never restful or relaxed due to a lingering unease in these British parks and woodlands. He employs the usual meditative tropes found in nature writing, in order to exploit and amplify the psychological sense of entitlement this relationship with the land denotes. These penetrable lyrical verses and essays deconstruct democratic notions of green space in the British landscape by racialising contemporary ecological poetics. The collections power lies in Allen-Paisants subtle destabilization of the ordinary dog walkers right to space, territory, property and leisure by positioning the colonised Black male bodys complicated and unsafe reality in these spaces.
Malika Booker
These observant poems lay their burdens down by the rivers of Babylon and try to sing the Lords 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? The poems are beautiful and gentle, but the questions they raise are difficult and important.
Kei Miller
