The second collection by "one of the most significant literary figures in the Caribbean" (The Globe and Mail).
Assured but chance-inflected, ever rooted in the local but always world-aware, Console reconsiders languages, geographies, and memories as luminous soundscapes. With lyric dexterity, Colin Channer jolts old notions of New England, cross-fading from the Berkshires to Anguilla, from Connecticut to Senegal. A dissolve to the poet’s childhood in Jamaica occurs after glimpsing an old record player in Providence, leading to the title poem’s meditations on reggae, religion, marriage, justice, and transgressions in the home.
With allusive links to photography, music, sea mammals, mistranslation, and the universal ritual of “the walk,” Console reorganizes our sense of time, collapses and rebreaks the remembered and certain, renames the familiar, reaches for settled etymologies, and turns words inside out.
— Includes 8 black-and-white photographs —
BUY: AMAZON | B&N | BOOKSHOP | BOOKS-A-MILLION | MACMILLAN
PRAISE:
“Channer (Providential) blends haunting lyricism, photography, and Jamaican patois into a potent combination that captures the geography of memory from the Caribbean to Senegal to New England . . . Sensory details startle with their physicality and immediacy . . . These intricate poems render the depths of memory in refreshingly original language.” —Publishers Weekly
“In true poetry, language is the spell, the hex, that changes us as we say it aloud. And Colin Channer is here to remind us that no matter the century or the crisis, the spell, indeed, holds true.” —Ilya Kaminsky, Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author of Deaf Republic
“Colin Channer’s new poems leap from the page. Their musicality is powerfully insistent, pulsing through every poem. Their diction is rich, tactile, nuanced, complex. The range of reference in the poems is extraordinary; the poet speaks of Walt Whitman and reggae singer-songwriter Burning Spear in the same breath. Channer writes of hurricanes in a hurricane of language. This Jamaican voice is also a world voice. Welcome to Colin Channer’s world.” —Martín Espada, author of Vivas to Those Who Have Failed
“What rich splendor these pages reveal. What vision and wisdom and grace. This new book from Colin Channer has expanded my heart and my mind, offering vivid and necessary ways of seeing, hearing, and understanding the world.” —Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
“The genius of Colin Channer’s Console is its profound sense of sound. Console is a soundscape, a mixing board of geographical and sensual landscapes, its various vocal languages musically charged to the utmost emotional effect. “All is fluid as I am collapsing // love and distance,” the poet says, “Who am I out of/within //this scene of benediction?”—quick-changing where the music takes him, a music “mystic with soul” that knows its “ginnal roots of myth,” a mix that is comedic, remixing history, “as if to match the age’s flares and fringes.” Of the many superlatives one might use to describe Console—astonishing, powerful, brilliant—none quite suffices. Console is poetry at poetry’s best.” —Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity
“There is music everywhere in Colin Channer’s new collection. Mixing, erasure, echo—and melody. Poems driven by the sounds of language, the ways in which words are aerated and released to jam on themselves. I felt the good karma of Derek Walcott and Bob Marley residing as spirits in these pages. Channer’s linguistic world translates so quickly into a stubborn physicalness—this air, this place, this consciousness. He has deeply inhabited so many disparate worlds, the new and the old, with the rhythms of something timeless, honoring what has passed and the yet to come. Lines that pound with a Caribbean heartbeat. By book’s end, Channer’s vision of his world and ours is . . . consoling.” —Daniel Halpern, author of Something Shining
“Transcendentally savvy, Colin Channer’s Console turns nostalgia on its head. These poems are cosmopolitan and primal as if all the continents were one again, the music of an oceanic mind. The poet’s language is a pulpit for his otherworldly calling, innovative and elevating, personal yet wholly of our time.” —Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Digest
Channer’s debut poetry collection achieves an intimate and lyric meditation on family, policing, loss, and violence, but the work is enlivened by humor, tenderness, and the rich possibilities that come from honest reflection. Not since Claude McKay’s Constab Ballads of 1912 has a writer attempted to tackle the unlikely literary figure of the Jamaican policeman. Now, over a century later, Channer draws on his own knowledge of Jamaican culture, on his complex relationship with his father (a Jamaican policeman), and frames these poems within the constantly humane principles of Rasta and reggae. The poems within Providential manage to turn the intricate relationships between a man and his father, a man and his mother, and man and his country, and a man and his children into something akin to grace.
BUY: AMAZON | B&N | BOOKSHOP | BOOKS-A-MILLION | AKASHIC
PRAISE:
“Channer has written a fine set of poems that, like classical myth, start with the search for the lost father and end with the found son, the poet in the process replacing the lost father with a found self.”
— Russell Banks, author of Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter
A dexterous, ambitious collection that delivers enough acoustic acrobatics to keep readers transfixed ’till the starlings sing out.'”
— Booklist
Lush lists and light-footedness and keen word choices all restore a limb to our comprehension of colonial trauma and make this one of the most lucid and telling poetry books of this exact time.”
— Eileen Myles, author of Snowflake
“The Caribbean policeman is a character both foreign and familiar at the center of this intimate debut poetry collection. Combining Jamaican patois and American English, it tells the story of violence, loss, and recovery in the wake of colonialism.”
— O, the Oprah Magazine
With contributors such as Derek Walcott, Valzyna Mort, Robert Pinsky, Elizabeth Alexander, Michael Ondaatje, Louis Simpson, Gabeeba Baderoon and Meena Alexander, So Much Things to Say is a reminder of contemporary poetry's range and bounty. Published to mark the 10th anniversary of Jamaica's Calabash International Literary Festival, the anthology gathers offerings from the diverse list of poets who shared their work with thousands of locals and visitors in the fishing village of Treasure Beach from 2001 through 2010. The collection's quality reflects the festival's deep interest in connecting the planet's writers and listeners on equally exciting terms. Coeditors Kwame Dawes and Colin Channer, who started the whimsical not for profit festival with film producer Justine Henzell, arrange the poems not by rank, alphabetical order, or stature, but by size. How do you take your poems—small, medium, large or extra large?
Contributors: Li-Young Lee, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, Terese Svoboda, Elizabeth Alexander, Gabeeba Baderoon, Gregory Pardlo, Martin Espada, Terrance Hayes, Valzyna Mort, Sonia Sanchez, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Staceyann Chin and more.
BUY: AMAZON | B&N | BOOKSHOP | BOOKS-A-MILLION | AKASHIC
PRAISE:
“So Much Things to Say, an anthology of poems read at the festival over its first decade, is a who’s who of international contemporary poetry.”
— Daily Beast
“American readers who expect to find a distilled representation of what is currently being written in the Caribbean island will instead find an array of voices, circling the same geographical place but interested in a variety of forms and styles.”
— poets.org
“Calabash is a serious literary festival with serious literary merits. It combines this with good humor and merriment.”
— Times Literary Supplement (UK)
“A mini-Woodstock on the Caribbean ... a world-class Caribbean literary festival.”
— New York Times