Colin Channer’s Console: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) will be on the shelves this summer. This poetry book is described as “the second collection by ‘one of the most significant literary figures in the Caribbean’” (The Globe and Mail).

Description: Colin Channer’s new poems jolt us with their assured yet playful soundscaping of disjunctions between languages and geographies, between memory and what gets erased. Console is grounded in New England but its author, born and raised in Jamaica, responds to his scenery with lyric dexterity, cross-fading from the Berkshires to Anguilla, from Connecticut to Senegal. A glimpse of an old record player in a shop in Providence dissolves to a time when reggae lifted his preadolescent spirit.

Console, in its concreteness, allusive links, and sonic variety, is partially suggested by dub, the soundscape art of Jamaica that is a source for punk, electronica, and experimental rock, where connections between songs and grits of songs are made at mixing boards. In Console, Channer reorganizes our perceptions of time, collapses and rebreaks the remembered and the certain, renames the familiar to make it blossom, reaches into settled etymologies, and turns words inside out.

Colin Channer is a 2022-2023 Cullman Fellow in Poetry at the New York Public Library and an associate professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, The Poetry Review, Agni, Conjunctions and other venues. Other books include the poetry collection Providential, the novella The Girl with the Golden Shoes, and the novel Waiting in Vain.

Console: Poems (Includes 8 black-and-white photographs)

Imprint Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN: 9780374607227

For more information, see https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374607227