Far District: Poems

A marvelous book of generous, giving poems. --Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth

Far District, the transporting debut by the author of House of Lords and Commons, charts the spiritual path of a poet-speaker caught between two spheres: the culture of bush people and a luminous, dangerous sea of myth. Crafting an impressionistic portrait of his youth in Jamaica, Ishion Hutchinson explores the West Indian distrust of European literature and mythology. The speaker fears the land of myth because he is loyal to the bush people, but he also desires to transcend his physical and intellectual poverty. Little by little, the two cultures come together as the speaker begins grafting childhood memories onto the realm of imagination, shaped by art, music, literature, and new glimpses of the world.

Written in both traditional and formless verse, as well as in English and Jamaican patois, Far District is an indelible, urgent collection. As the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award committee said of its 2011 winner, Far District is a classic, which is to say a rare and exemplary first book.