Jason Allen-Paisant

Jamaican-born poet and academic, author of Thinking With Trees (2021) and Self-Portrait as Othello (2023), which won the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize.

This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.

  1. 1. Self Portrait As Othello

    A lyrical sequence that refracts the figure of Shakespeare’s Moor through contemporary cityscapes, using persona, travel notes, and love poems to interrogate Black masculinity, migration, and the politics of looking. Moving through museums, metro stations, and Venetian canals, the speaker navigates desire, surveillance, and belonging, reclaiming tenderness from a tragic archetype. The result is a hybrid of poems and prose pieces that stages selfhood as performance while searching for a liberating, diasporic way to live and love.