Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and House of Lords and Commons, which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, and the Whiting Writers' Award, among others. Hutchinson is a professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University.
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE
Named a Best Book of 2023 by Financial Times, Library Journal, The
New Statesman, The Telegraph, and The Washington Post "Hutchinson
is the most verbally gifted of the younger poets now reaching
maturity. . . but the writing is charged with a passion rare since
the salad days of Geoffrey Hill. . . Hutchinson can hardly write a
line without charging it with gunpowder . . . I'd give up whole
books by many poets for Hutchinson's lines." --William Logan, New
Criterion "Hutchinson decolonizes the epic in this chronicle of
West Indian soldiers . . . Interwoven with episodes from the life
of a Jamaican schoolboy in the 1990s named Godspeed, these
soldiers' histories contribute a new chapter to the story of modern
poetry." --Srikanth Reddy, The Washington Post "One of the
signature strengths of Hutchinson's work has been his willingness
to ransack literature or forms and diction . . . Drawing from the
long tradition of colonists and their language to document the
exploits of exploited Jamaican volunteers to the British Imperial
cause, Hutchinson makes space for the people his poem memorializes.
Sounding the tradition, he makes it free and remixes the elements,
putting everything in service to his own shining ends." --Michael
Autrey, Booklist (Starred Review) "What Hutchinson recovers of
these soldiers, then, is not some imagined specificity of their
individual characters and traits, but rather the way in which their
wounds, lives, and deaths persist . . . and it is Hutchinson's
caution and the respect with which he approaches his subject--never
cheating, never pretending to know more than he does, while
nonetheless never able to believe his subjects truly disappeared
into oblivion--that allows us to feel viscerally that strange
entwining of the forgotten dead and the present." --Phil Klay,
Commonweal "A virtuosic dance between memory and forgetting,
distant tragedy and personal grief." --Leila Greening, The Arts
Desk "[A] potent, memorializing third collection . . . Hutchinson
adeptly blends time and events to create a lexically rich,
glintingly lyric set of counterpoints. . . These vigorous poems are
an epitaph for overlooked combatants and a way of honoring the long
shadows cast by a post-colonial inheritance." --Publishers Weekly
"Ishion Hutchinson's School of Instructions defies category--not
with philosophy or doctrine, but through illuminating imagery and
pace. And, here, the reader must be ready to engage a deeper truth
this work brings to light, which seems to be asking through
innuendo, Were Jamaican troops fighting in the Middle East during
the First World War silenced? What at first may seem symbolic and
totemic grows into a profound language embodying a rhythm that is
cultural and personal. The subtle details--the officers are British
and the Caribbean soldiers, low-ranking fodder dying in the name of
the crown--become haunting brushstrokes on a tonal canvas. This
poet shows how a sense of place travels as images of home and
voices in the head and heart; dreams of the Caribbean Sea become
overlays upon maps of sandy battlefields. Such realities are
embedded throughout School of Instructions, and in this sense the
title is the first trope of irony in a masterful work." --Yusef
Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth "Ishion
Hutchinson draws on all the conventions of epic--the proper names
and epitaphs, the lists, the materiel, the violence--only to undo
them. Instead he reveals the striking language and singular
consciousness of his protagonists as they make their way through an
ancient landscape they already know as shaped by eternity. By its
end, this moving, humane, long poem floods the reader with a sense
of their living presence and destiny." --Susan Stewart, author of
The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture "'Source
of echo/madman of prophecies, ' chants the over-voice in Ishion
Hutchinson's majestic School of Instructions. That's how this
lyric-epic works, picking up signals from the Bible, Blake, David
Jones's In Parenthesis, Geoffrey Hill, and Jamaican dub music. To
honor the West Indian soldiers who fought for England in the Great
War, Hutchinson splices the memory of the Black soldiers into the
story of Godspeed, his modern Jamaican 'boyself' enduring
thrashings at his 'school of instructions.' With this radical poem,
Hutchinson leaps into the ranks of the visionary company."
--Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth "School of Instructions is
poetry on a larger scale than we are accustomed to, echoing the
scope of David Jones's In Parenthesis and the verbal intensity of
Geoffrey Hill and Derek Walcott. Hutchinson seizes our attention
with the drama a little-known campaign in the Great War and never
lets go, through intimacy with an individual named Godspeed. The
work unfolds in counterpoint with memories of Jamaica and allusions
to classic literature and the Bible, giving us a view of
cataclysmic history from ground level, in a voice that soars and
repeats and advances like the finest music." --Robert Morgan,
author of In the Snowbird Mountain and Other Stories
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