Self Portrait as Othello

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2023A Guardian and The Irish Times Book of the YearJason AllenPaisants debut collection Thinking With Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry and was an Irish Times and White Review Book of the Year 2021. In Poetry London Maryam Hessavi wrote, Jason AllenPaisant is uncompromising when digging down through the undergrowth of our imperialist past and yet he succeeds in replanting new narratives in the same soil where these toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside.The interlocking poems of his second collection, SelfPortrait as Othello, imagine Othello in the urban landscapes of modern London, Paris and Venice and invent the kinds of narrative he might tell about his intersecting identities. Poetic memoir and ekphrastic experiment, SelfPortrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real. Othello here represents a structure of feeling that was emerging in seventeenthcentury Venice, and is still with us.Portraiting himself as Othello, AllenPaisant refracts his European travels and considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressiveness and vulnerabilities. Othellos intertwined identities as immigrant and Black, which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twentyfirstcentury Europe.