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, crossfading 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.
"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
"Music is a vital force in this eclectic poetry collection . . . Dub and reggae inspire and inform Channer's dense, lushly textured compositions. Contemplating place and displacement, the poems emphasize the palimpsestic, remix-like effect produced by emigration and exile."
The New Yorker
"Channer's own experience and existence makes Jamaica live in his new home of New England, and vice versa . . . If colonizing is when those in power claim a land as theirs to imagine and control, colonizing in reverse might mean reasserting one's own belonging in the face of imperial dreams that tend to erase the reality of colonized people in all spaces, here and there."
