Console: Poems

The second collection by ＂one of the most significant literary figures in the Caribbean＂ (TheGlobe 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

Colin Channer is a poet and fiction writer born in Jamaica. His awards include the Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library and the Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship from Brown University, where he is an associate professor of literary arts. Channer’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Agni, and Conjunctions, among other publications. His books include the poetry collection Providential, the novella The Girl with the Golden Shoes, and the novel Waiting in Vain.