Thinking with Trees

'Jason Allen-Paisant deftly inscribes his own signature on worlds inner and outer in these gorgeous poems. The future of Caribbean lyric poetry is in great hands.' - Lorna Goodison; 'These observant poems lay their burdens down by the rivers of Babylon and try to sing the Lord's song in a strange land. What might it mean for the black body to experience nature, not as labour, but as leisure? What might it mean to simply walk through a park and observe the birds and the trees? These poems are beautiful and gentle, but the questions they raise are difficult and important.' - Kei Miller; 'In these quietly subversive lyrics, expectations are undone, of ecologies, of people, of poems.' - Rachael Allen; 'The power of this expansive, original book is in its attention to the ways in which a sense of leisure, territory and belonging is an implicit, racialised underpinning in the long tradition of nature writing ... Thinking with Trees is an expansive, fracturing, subversive book.' - Sean Hewitt, The Irish Times; 'The poet scrupulously decouples nature from any sense of private ownership, opening himself up to more generous, alternative worldviews. This is a bold and impressive debut.' - David Wheatley, Guardian Review Roundup; 'Allen-Paisant has penned a debut that may be years ahead of its time.' - Anthony Anaxagorou; '[A] remarkable debut poetry collection [...] Gently, beautifully, unsettlingly about race, nature, naming, access, green-ness...and, yes, trees & forests. This is going to be a book I return to, teach with, learn from.' - Robert Macfarlane