cover image Fugitive Tilts: Essays

Fugitive Tilts: Essays

Ishion Hutchinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $33 (384p) ISBN 978-0-374-60051-8

In this erudite collection, Hutchinson (School of Instructions), a NBCC Award–winning poet, ruminates on colonialism, diasporic identity, and home. The sea serves as a recurring motif in essays that encompass Hutchinson’s fond recollections of reading Treasure Island as a child on his grandmother’s veranda overlooking the Caribbean Sea in Jamaica, as well as considerations of how artists have grappled with the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. For instance, he describes how British artist Donald Rodney sketched drops of blood while plagued with visions of slave ships during a hospital stint for the sickle-cell anemia that would kill him in 1998. The tension between the ocean’s splendor and its role in this brutal history permeates the volume, as when Hutchinson recounts breaking down in tears while eating a meal from a street vendor during a trip to Senegal that he undertook to better understand his heritage: “Sentimental or romantic, there’s a faith I’m unwilling to concede that in eating a fish from the same terrible sea my ancestors endured or perished in, I was in spirit with them.” Hutchinson elegantly probes the painful history of Atlantic slavery with a potent combination of intimate personal reflections and sophisticated artistic exegesis. It’s a worthy complement to Dionne Brand’s Salvage. Photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)