Our Spring Choice has landed and it’s absolutely astonishing! Members will get their exclusive early copies (ahead of its bookshop release date) in our Spring mailing very soon.
Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-portrait as Othello is a masterful second collection: part memoir, part self-invention, part lyrical interrogation of the self as “other”. These poems force us to reconsider “the black male body”, its presence and absence from the renaissance of Othello to present day migrants and the poet’s own experiences of crossing the cities of Europe. “You re-emerge into this life / raising suspicions again".
Full of geographical crossings and liminal spaces, these poems confront difficult truths, upend stereotypes and the limits of language itself, to celebrate black identity. “Nobody should be wrong to be / so beautiful in this world”