Fugitive Tilts - by Ishion Hutchinson

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Hutchinson expresses a deep love of prose, of its grand possibilities and subtle confinements. This collection represents his earnest and thrilling mission to efface the line between poetry and prose, to introduce us to the possibility that each is affirmed and made complete by the other." --Tope Folarin, New York Magazine

"In this erudite collection, Hutchinson, a NBCC Award-winning poet, ruminates on colonialism, diasporic identity, and home. . . . Hutchinson elegantly probes the painful history of Atlantic slavery with a potent combination of intimate personal reflections and sophisticated artistic exegesis." --Publishers Weekly

"Hutchinson's first book of prose is a miscellany containing a myriad. . . . Praise brings out Hutchinson's finest. Pieces about photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi, artists Donald Rodney and Nari Ward, and poets Les Murray, George Seferis, and Claude McKay instance ecstatic ekphrasis. The essay about his move to Kingston for college harrows, while the essay on Frederick Douglass flames." --Michael Autrey, Booklist

"This is what you hope a poet's prose debut will be. . . a wide-ranging and deeply personal collection of essays that engages deeply with art, poetry, and history, all with the kind of attention to language that makes you grateful for poets who grace us with prose. " --LitHub

"Poet Hutchinson's essays swoosh and roll like the sea that has surrounded and molded his life and art, from his beginnings in Jamaica to his coastal journeys on to his belief that ocean waters ultimately connect us all through suffering and joy. Whether his eye turns to childhood literature like "Treasure Island," reggae music, or an Impressionist painting, the author connects his influences to the wider world of art, community and our shared humanity. " -- Bethanne Patrick, The Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, which won the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award; House of Lords and Commons, which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry; and School of Instructions, which was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, a Whiting Award, and a Windham Campbell Prize in Poetry, among other honors. He is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.