WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN POETRY

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2016

Library Journal 5 Best Poetry books of 2016

"Hutchinson’s lines listen to themselves, finding the next phrase, and then the next, implicit in what’s already been written down. His sound effects are exquisite: the clusters of consonants . . . and the vowels so open you could fall into them, the magisterial cresting syntax, the brilliant coupling of unlike words . . . [A] very promising book." —Dan Chiasson, New Yorker

“What nerve and music his poems possess, how beautifully they chart the poet’s search. House of Lords and Commons begins the mythology of a great voice.” —John Freeman

“To call Ishion Hutchinson a brilliant Caribbean poet is just as silly as pigeon-holing Eavan Boland an ‘Irish poet’ or Adonis a ‘poet from Syria.’ This is simply because Hutchinson comes to us from the country called music, he stuns the reader with the sheer symphony of his sentences.
I love his rage against politics (‘casting / beatitudes at the castor-oiled pimps / in Parliament; Pray for them, joyfully, / their amazing death!’) and the lyrics of childhood intimacies, of tenderness, fatherhood. To capture one of these tonalities would already have been a wonderful gift. But the fact of their abundant, generous, choral presence on these pages, tells us that we are in Hutchinson major talent. He is without a doubt one of the most gifted poets of my generation.” —Ilya Kaminsky

“Writing about the colonial legacy of violence on the paradisaical landscape of rural Jamaica, Ishion Hutchinson is a poet of great imaginative intensity. His sponsors are Hart Crane, George Seferis, and Derek Walcott, who, like him, are luxurious and stern at once. In these poems, hammered language has a jazzy, classical, rough, painterly beauty.” —Henri Cole

“A tensile strength runs through the vibrant abundance of Ishion Hutchinson’s work—it is the pure line of poetry, shaped by his sun-lit vision and music. Lords and Commons has been wrested from suffering and cruelty, irony and violence. And, in the end, it is an act of forgiveness.” —Susan Stewart