Pitch Lake Format: Paperback

In Pitch Lake, Andre Bagoo, author of the Bocas prize shortlisted poetry collection, Burn, displays a continuing commitment to exploration and experiment. Andre Bagoo’s poems explore the multiple resonances of the title, where pitch signifies both the stickiness of memory – the way the La Brea Pitch Lake is a place where “buried trees [are] born again” – and the idea of scattering: of places and impressions and the effort to hold them in one vision. There are poems that encompass reflections on art; Trinidad as a fallen Eden; Black Lives Matter; visits to Britain and cows “straight out of Hardy”; poems about finding love in a climate of homophobia; and poems written in response to Trinidad’s disappearing fauna and threatened eco-system. In between the sections of “Pitch” and “Lake”, comes “Black Box”, poems written in response to art works shown at the Caribbean Queer Visualities exhibition in Belfast, Northern Ireland. “Lake”, is a sequence of prose poems, presenting subtly dislocated narratives that, even at their shortest, disrupt the reader’s expectations of where they are heading. In their brevity, these prose pieces offer surfaces, like that of a lake, that invite the reader to wonder what lies underneath but warn that this is not necessarily what is most predictable. that invite the reader to wonder what lies underneath but warn that this is not necessarily what is most predictable.

Andre Bagoo is a Trinidadian poet and journalist. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals including: Almost Island, Draconian Switch, The Caribbean Review of Books, Caribbean Writer, Word Riot, Boston Review, St Petersburg Review and elsewhere. In 2005, Andre was shortlisted for a Derek Walcott Writing Prize. His first collection of poems, Trick Vessels (2012), and his latest collection, Burn (2015), are both published by Shearsman Books.