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• A stunning poetry collection about being Black, male and expatriate

  I’ve seen and read quite a few perspicacious interpretations of Shakespeare’s Othello, but these meditations on what it means to be a man in a black male body in our times is the most resonant that I have read. Not just because of the superb skill and beauty of Jason Allen’s poetry but because it’s a portrait based on real experience, that I very much connect with, as Othello’s sister. Self- Portrait as Othello is a poetry collection that captivates with its great lyrical beauty and yet conversational tonality that makes its big themes feel intimate and everyday. It’s also a deeply moving poetic auto/biography that tells of journeys through disparate yet historically connected landscapes; England, France, Venice, the Jamaican countryside-- the restless, questing life of a Jamaican expatriate living at the many intersections of colonial histories and their aftermaths. Jason Allen allows us to walk with the main character as he criss-crosses many spaces between. Between memories of growing up with a nurturing grandmother and un-memories of an absent father. Between the seductions of success in the metropoles of the ex-colonial powers and his full awareness of how such success is false and danger. Between his love of words and sound that made him fall in love with the languages he loves, and his knowledge of the historical oppressions that brought those languages to his Jamaican door. Between love and distrust (including self-distrust) in the space where love comes to him. Between allowing himself to live in the power and passion of a single moment, and the haunting awareness of how his black male body is forever an object of suspicion, forever outsider in the very space where he is most immersed. One of the things I love about this book is that though it deals with these kinds of issues with raw, rare and beautiful honesty, there’s no victim syndrome here. The persona is not reduced to the either-or contradictions that the invention called race is always threatening to impose on Black people. He has a history and an inner and personal life that are not dependent on the race narrative imposed on his body. The home he left behind but never quite leaves is a place of trauma but also dignity and grounding. Everything that makes him rich as a person began there. Even long after we noticed that Shakespeare’s Othello’s trauma was not his jealousy (what did Othello have to be jealous about?), long after we realized it was about how race invented Man and Not-Man and Not-Quite-Man? in early modern Venice/England, we’ve hardly thought about the fact that Othello was his mother’s son, not his father’s, and that the handkerchief he carried like hope came from her. For this reason I read the parts about the persona’s grandmother in Self-Portrait as Othello, and the place she came from, over and over, and I am saying ‘yes, yes, yes’ and grateful. This collection is so rich. It's worth reading many times over.

• Disappointing.

  I thought this was gigantically over-rated and a bit obvious.

• Delightful

  Beautiful inspirational poems

• New poetry

  with an interesting and clever take from a poet who is new to me

• Excellent

  Eyeopening

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