RI Poet Laureate Colin Channer to read for National Poetry Month at Providence Public Library

RI Poet Laureate Colin Channer to Visit PPL during National Poetry Month to Read from New Book, CONSOLE

During National Poetry Month Rhode Island Poet Laureate Colin Channer will visit the Providence Public Library (PPL), 150 Empire Street in downtown Providence on Wednesday, April 17, 5 to 6:30 pm to read from his new book, Console.  A finalist for a 2023 New England Book Award, it is the second collection by “one of the most significant literary figures in the Caribbean.” (The Globe and Mail).

This event is free and open to the public, and takes place in the Library’s Mural Room (3rd floor); reservations are appreciated, and seating is limited.

Books will be available for sale and signing provided by Barrington Books.

Console is described as “assured but chance-inflected, ever rooted in the local but always world-aware”… [reconsidering] languages, geographies, and memories as luminous soundscapes. With lyric dexterity, Colin Channer jolts old notions of New England, cross-fading from the Berkshires to Anguilla, from Connecticut to Senegal. A dissolve to the poet’s childhood in Jamaica occurs after glimpsing an old record player in Providence, leading to the title poem’s meditations on reggae, religion, marriage, justice, and transgressions in the home”.

“With allusive links to photography, music, sea mammals, mistranslation, and the universal ritual of “the walk,” Console reorganizes our sense of time, collapses and rebreaks the remembered and certain, renames the familiar, reaches for settled etymologies, and turns words inside out.”

One reviewer said, “the strength of this collection of poetry was in the rhythm”.

About Colin Channer

Colin Channer was born in Jamaica, educated there, and in New York. He has published ten books as fiction writer, poet, and editor, and his prose and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Bomb, The Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Conjunctions, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly and other venues. Recent honors include a 2023 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poet’s & Writers Magazine; a 2022 Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library; a 2019 Amy Clampitt Residency; and a 2018 Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship from Brown University, where he is an associate professor in the Department of Literary Arts.