Thinking with Trees: Poems - Softcover

Allen-Paisant, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571315810 ISBN 13: 9781571315816

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2025

Synopsis

“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, author of From Harvey River

Jason Allen-Paisant has emerged in recent years as one of the most celebrated poets in the UK and across the West Indies. Winner already of the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, his writing has been acclaimed for its artistry and the fresh perspective it offers on the relationship of the African diaspora to place and the natural world.

In this, his debut collection of poems, he recalls an idyllic boyhood in his native Jamaica, where the roots of guango and yam vines burrow deep into the bauxite soil. Walking with his grandmother to reach the yam fields she worked, he envisions how “the muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived.” Transplanted to England, where he lives and works now, he describes lovely rambles in entirely different landscapes. But Allen-Paisant’s experience in the dense woodlands around Leeds is complex—unleashed dogs are welcome, and Black men are found suspect. “Try to imagine daffodils / in the hands of a black family / on a black walk / in spring,” he writes, in a radical response to Wordsworth’s pastoral.

Subversive in its excavation of an imperialist past and wonderfully generous in its exploration of alternative worldviews, Thinking with Trees represents the arrival in North America of poems that expand roots and leaves into something deeper, richer, less compromising.

About this title

About the Author

Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and award-winning poet. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry, Thinking with Trees and Self-Portrait as Othello, which won the United Kingdom’s two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023—the Forward Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize. He is also a Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and Associate Editor of Callaloo Literary Journal. Jason lives in Leeds with his partner and two children.

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571315810
• ISBN 13: 9781571315816
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 126