Console

The second collection by one of the most significant literary figures in the Caribbean (The Globe and Mail). 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. Includes 8 black-and-white photographs