Providential

"Channer has written a fine set of poems that, like classical myth, start with the search for the lost father and end with the found son, the poet in the process replacing the lost father with a found self."
--Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter

"The voices and irrepressible human dance of the clan pulsing at this book's center leave me breathless and I realize how close the voices are to my own, how much I crave this dance."
--Patricia Smith, author of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

"This is such a brilliant 'toast,' this swift and pained and skimming history of Jamaica sweetly written by a poet with a cop dad.Providential does justice to the diasporic reality of places being 'there but not there,' including of course America, the poet's current home. Lush lists and light-footedness and keen word choices all restore a limb to our comprehension of colonial trauma and make this one of the most lucid and telling poetry books of this exact time."
--Eileen Myles, author of Snowflake

"Channer writes with a moving vulnerability and much lyric grace, revealing new facets to familiar themes--home, family, history, and the evolving journey of self. A universal, timeless meditation."
--Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas

"This one is an audacious and brilliant take on noir, written with pitch-perfect rhythm and a keen eye for supple, limber turns."
--Lorna Goodison, author of From Harvey River

Channer's debut poetry collection achieves an intimate and lyric meditation on family, policing, loss, and violence, but the work is enlivened by humor, tenderness, and the rich possibilities that come from honest reflection. Combined with a capacity to offer physical landscapes with painterly sensitivity and care, a graceful mining of the nuances of Jamaican patwa and American English, and a judicious use of metaphor and similie,Providential is a work of "heartical" insight and vulnerability.

Not since Claude McKay's Constab Ballads of 1912 has a writer attempted to tackle the unlikely literary figure of the Jamaican policeman. Now, over a century later, Channer draws on his own knowledge of Jamaican culture, on his complex relationship with his father (a Jamaican policeman), and frames these poems within the constantly humane principles of Rasta and reggae. The poems withinProvidential manage to turn the intricate relationships between a man and his father, a man and his mother, and man and his country, and a man and his children into something akin to grace.

Colin Channer was born in Jamaica to a pharmacist and cop. Junot Diaz calls him "one of the Caribbean Diaspora's finest writers." His poems have appeared inPrairie Schooner, Harvard Review, The Common, and Renaissance Noire, among other places. Channer has served as Newhouse Professor in Creative Writing at Wellesley College and Fannie Hurst Writer in Residence at Brandeis University. His many books of prose include the novella The Girl with the Golden Shoes, "a very moving and mesmerizing journey" in the words of Edwidge Danticat. He won the Silver Musgrave Medal in Literature in 2010 and currently lives in New England.Providential is his first poetry book.