"Channer (Providential) blends haunting lyricism, photography, and Jamaican patois into a potent combination that captures the geography of memory from the Caribbean to Senegal to New England . . . Sensory details startle with their physicality and immediacy . . . These intricate poems render the depths of memory in refreshingly original language." —Publishers Weekly
“In true poetry, language is the spell, the hex, that changes us as we say it aloud. And Colin Channer is here to remind us that no matter the century or the crisis, the spell, indeed, holds true.” —Ilya Kaminsky, Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author of Deaf Republic
"Colin Channer’s new poems leap from the page. Their musicality is powerfully insistent, pulsing through every poem. Their diction is rich, tactile, nuanced, complex. The range of reference in the poems is extraordinary; the poet speaks of Walt Whitman and reggae singer-songwriter Burning Spear in the same breath. Channer writes of hurricanes in a hurricane of language. This Jamaican voice is also a world voice. Welcome to Colin Channer’s world." —Martín Espada, author of Vivas to Those Who Have Failed
"What rich splendor these pages reveal. What vision and wisdom and grace. This new book from Colin Channer has expanded my heart and my mind, offering vivid and necessary ways of seeing, hearing, and understanding the world." —Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
"The genius of Colin Channer’s Console is its profound sense of sound. Console is a soundscape, a mixing board of geographical and sensual landscapes, its various vocal languages musically charged to the utmost emotional effect. “All is fluid as I am collapsing // love and distance,” the poet says, “Who am I out of/within //this scene of benediction?”—quick-changing where the music takes him, a music “mystic with soul” that knows its “ginnal roots of myth,” a mix that is comedic, remixing history, “as if to match the age’s flares and fringes.” Of the many superlatives one might use to describe Console—astonishing, powerful, brilliant—none quite suffices. Console is poetry at poetry’s best." —Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity
"There is music everywhere in Colin Channer’s new collection. Mixing, erasure, echo—and melody. Poems driven by the sounds of language, the ways in which words are aerated and released to jam on themselves. I felt the good karma of Derek Walcott and Bob Marley residing as spirits in these pages. Channer’s linguistic world translates so quickly into a stubborn physicalness—this air, this place, this consciousness. He has deeply inhabited so many disparate worlds, the new and the old, with the rhythms of something timeless, honoring what has passed and the yet to come. Lines that pound with a Caribbean heartbeat. By book’s end, Channer’s vision of his world and ours is . . . consoling." —Daniel Halpern, author of Something Shining
“Transcendentally savvy, Colin Channer’s Console turns nostalgia on its head. These poems are cosmopolitan and primal as if all the continents were one again, the music of an oceanic mind. The poet’s language is a pulpit for his otherworldly calling, innovative and elevating, personal yet wholly of our time.” —Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Digest
08/01/2023
The lyricism of poet/novelist Channer's second poetry collection (after Providential) demands constant attention from its audience and rewards that attention. Music (particularly dub, with its emphasis on remix and pastiche) both grounds and catalyzes the collection, acting as metaphor, form, and subject. Poems muse on place, exile, and belonging, weaving between the Jamaica of Channer's youth, his current New England home, and various memory-driven wanderings, from Senegal to Amy Clampitt's cabin in the Berkshires. Sound and water, as well as creatures of the water, often launch remembrance or connections, and the poems both question exodus and display a liberating embrace of the nomadic self and home ("For now and months to come I'm Berkshire, too"). Temporal mash-ups are scattered through the collection ("I'm half dissolved to Kingston,/ maybe '72"), lending to its often dreamlike associative atmosphere ("what is then and then this now?"). The long second section, "Hurricane Suite," splices photos from historic flooding in Providence, RI, with poems that mix music, Biblical story, memory, and myth ("There's reggae,/ Jonah, whale. It's with them/ I myth travel"), ultimately questioning what might be learned from devastation. VERDICT A dreamy, vivid, linguistically alive collection that will reward the careful reader.—Amy Dickinson
