"A marvelous book of generous, giving poems." —Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth
Far District, the transporting debut by the author of House of Lords and Commons, charts the spiritual path of a poet-speaker caught between two spheres: the culture of bush people and a luminous, dangerous sea of myth. Crafting an impressionistic portrait of his youth in Jamaica, Ishion Hutchinson explores the West Indian distrust of European literature and mythology. The speaker fears the land of myth because he is loyal to the bush people, but he also desires to transcend his physical and intellectual poverty. Little by little, the two cultures come together as the speaker begins grafting childhood memories onto the realm of imagination, shaped by art, music, literature, and new glimpses of the world.
Written in both traditional and formless verse, as well as in English and Jamaican patois, Far District is an indelible, urgent collection. As the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award committee said of its 2011 winner, "Far District is a classic, which is to say a rare and exemplary first book."
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 12, 2024 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780374604837
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780374604837
- File size: 374 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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October 15, 2024
Hutchinson's debut, Far District, is appearing for the first time in the U.S, 14 years late and after his third collection, School of Instructions (2023). But poetry of this quality is never belated and ever auspicious. If the first poem in any collection is under pressure, the first poem in a first collection is under more. About a boy's confrontation with a carcass on the way to school, "The Turning Road" also manages to be about the road not taken and a painting by Andr� Derain. Everything is alive to Hutchinson. He compares and contrasts what he finds at home in Jamaica with the colonial sense of an island without history. Not only the title of the collection and of the collection's piercing long poem about Hutchinson's home ground around Port Antonio, ""Far District,"" is in the syncretic tradition of writers Hutchinson addresses--Georg Trakl, Eugenio Montale, Claude McKay, Christopher Smart, Henry Vaughan and Peter Tosh. Hutchinson is doing what every major poet does, remaking the tradition in his own image.COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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