Providential Paperback by Colin Channer

Product Details

• Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd. (2015-09-08)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 96 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781617754050
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

Best-selling writer Colin Channer's debut poetry collection tackles the unlikely literary figure of the Jamaican policeman.

"The Caribbean policeman is a character both foreign and familiar at the center of this intimate debut poetry collection. Combining Jamaican patois and American English, it tells the story of violence, loss, and recovery in the wake of colonialism.” —O, the Oprah Magazine, One of 19 Books to Pick Up This October

“Extremely worthwhile . . . Channer brings an Olive Senior like narrativity to these sharp character sketches, and by deploying his keen novelist’s eye he can trace the actions and effects of power on these men and their families in interesting and compelling language.” —Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal

Channer’s debut poetry collection achieves an intimate and lyric meditation on family, policing, loss, and violence, but the work is enlivened by humor, tenderness, and the rich possibilities that come from honest reflection. Combined with a capacity to offer physical landscapes with painterly sensitivity and care, a graceful mining of the nuances of Jamaican patwa and American English, and a judicious use of metaphor and similie, Providential is a work of “heartical” insight and vulnerability.

Not since Claude McKay’s Constab Ballads of 1912 has a writer attempted to tackle the unlikely literary figure of the Jamaican policeman. Now, over a century later, Channer draws on his own knowledge of Jamaican culture, on his complex relationship with his father (a Jamaican policeman), and frames these poems within the constantly humane principles of Rasta and reggae. The poems within Providential manage to turn the intricate relationships between a man and his father, a man and his mother, and man and his country, and a man and his children into something akin to grace.

About the Author

COLIN CHANNER was born in Jamaica to a pharmacist and cop. Junot Díaz calls him “one of the Caribbean Diaspora’s finest writers.” His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review, the Common, and Renaissance Noire, among other places. Channer has served as Newhouse Professor in Creative Writing at Wellesley College and Fannie Hurst Writer in Residence at Brandeis University. His many books of prose include the novella The Girl with the Golden Shoes, “a very moving and mesmerizing journey” in the words of Edwidge Danticat. He won the Silver Musgrave Medal in Literature in 2010 and currently lives in New England. Providential is his first poetry book.