Nottingham’s independent bookshop | 14a Long Row, Nottingham NG1 2DH | 0115 8373097
Jason Allen-Paisant’s 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 Allen-Paisant 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, Self-Portrait 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 ekphratic experiment, Self-Portrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real. Othello here represents a structure of feeling that was emerging in seventeenth-century Venice, and is still with us.
Portraying himself as Othello, Allen-Paisant refracts his European travels and considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressive-ness and vulnerabilities. Othello’s intertwined identities as ‘immigrant’ and ‘Black’, which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.
Postage is calculated at 10% of your order value, minimum £1.00, up to a maximum of £3.00. There is a free postage option at checkout if you are housebound/shielding, on low income, or need help with postage costs for any other reason. Your order will usually arrive within 2-3 working days.
Shop Opening Hours
Monday to Saturday:
10.00am – 5.30pm
Sunday:
12.00pm – 4.00pm
Contact Us:
Five Leaves Bookshop
14a Long Row
Nottingham
NG1 2DH
0115 8373097