Fugitive Tilts: Essays

Ishion Hutchinson turns his poetic sensibility to questions of home, displacement, and memory in his beautiful and searingly brilliant prose debut.

In Fugitive Tilts, the poet Ishion Hutchinson turns to prose to create an incomplete biography of love: love of poetry, discovered in childhood; love of home, with its continual disconnections and returns; and love of the works and artists--from Treasure Island, to John Coltrane, to the Jamaican music of his youth--that look over him with an angel’s aura.

Drawing inspiration from Derek Walcott’s notion that ＂the sea is history,＂ Fugitive Tilts is suffused with the sea, present whether Hutchinson is recalling a trip to Senegal or memorializing his grandmother in a meditation on a painting by Édouard Vuillard. With this fresh, archipelagic sensibility Hutchinson confronts the fraught questions of inheritances and influences, ＂acknowledging,＂ in his words, ＂something outside our view.＂ These essays, varied in their forms and ranging across time and place, allow Hutchinson to build a space from which the suffering of the past and the present can be reckoned with and survived.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award; House of Lords and Commons, which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry; and School of Instructions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry, among other honors. He lives in Ithaca, New York.