{"title":"Books by Jason Allen-Paisant","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781800173101","title":"Self-Portrait as Othello","description":"Shortlisted for the Writers' Prize 2024               Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2024               Longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2024               Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023               Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023               The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2023               A Guardian and The Irish Times Book of the Year                              Jason Allen-Paisant's 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. Othello's intertwined identities as 'immigrant' and 'Black', which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43128083284146,"sku":"9781800173101","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781800173101.jpg?v=1786026791"},{"product_id":"9781529153620","title":"The Possibility of Tenderness","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Possibility of Tenderness\u003c\/i\u003e is a personal history narrated through the lens of the ‘grung’ and plants. It’s also a people’s history of the land, a family saga, an archival detective story through time. It’s the migration tale of a young scholar who arrives in Britain from rural Jamaica to study at Oxford to achieve ‘upward social mobility’ and who now lives in Roundhay Leeds. Suddenly, amidst his journey of dreams and class aspiration, the plants and people of his native district, Coffee Grove, begin to offer different ways of living, alternative dreams, and the possibility of tenderness and the permission to roam England.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMarrying the local and the familial with global history and unfolding as a timely and immersive tale of land, environment, and the world of plants, \u003ci\u003eThe Possibility of Tenderness \u003c\/i\u003ereveals how the history of a tiny rural village in a mountainous region of Jamaica is interlinked with that of modern Britain. And, also what that rural village can teach us about leisure, land ownership and reclamation today.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMama, the author’s grandmother, is a central protagonist of the story. Alongside her, herbalists, plant workers, farmers, and plant lovers help forge an intimate portrait of Coffee Grove, as do the plants themselves; fever grass, jointa, search mi heart, leaf of life, helping Allen-Paisant revise his sense of self and solidify a new understanding of his place in the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Possibility of Tenderness\u003c\/i\u003e is a cross-pollinating book about the transformative power of plants, the legacy of dreams, and the lessons they offer for living with the earth.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57685822701941,"sku":"9781804944950","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":54926175601013,"sku":"9781529153620","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781804944950.jpg?v=1792599023"},{"product_id":"9780192867223","title":"Engagements with Aimé Césaire","description":"Aimé Césaire is due a major critical reinterpretation and that is exactly what this book carries out. Through an in-depth grasp of the trajectory and core significance of Césaire's work, Jason Allen-Paisant highlights a set of links it makes between 'spirit,' 'poetry,' and 'knowing'. These explications, setting Césaire's work in relation to a rigorously accounted for set of influences, reframe how we understand his writings, enhancing their philosophical, rather than merely political, aspects. Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits is about more than Negritude (which has come to mean something less than a deep poetic sensibility with its own aspirational aesthetics and metaphysics, and rather something more like a fantasy-ridden iteration of pan-Africanism). It shows an Aimé Césaire deeply relevant to today: to the crises of ecological collapse, capitalist dystopias, and ideologies predicated upon fear and the threat of foreigners; and to contemporary chatter around interspecies collaboration and the need to rethink the entrepreneurial subject of Western political thought. Recasting Césaire's work is not just a matter of transforming a significant figure. It is also about rethinking legacies. This book is an engagement in the truest sense--the work of a contemporary Black poet who expounds the ways in which Césaire's work articulates for him a new politics of the self.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56225855701365,"sku":"9780192867223","price":78.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780192867223_f5487ad7-65f7-400b-80db-f629002905ac.jpg?v=1786011281"},{"product_id":"9781800171138","title":"Thinking with Trees","description":"Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023. 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.'","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312928993653,"sku":"9781800171138","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781800171138_3dec830c-148b-49c0-9f9d-a26cf4114405.jpg?v=1786026748"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-jason-allen-paisant.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}