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House of Lords and Commons

Poems

Ishion Hutchinson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN10: 0374537283
ISBN13: 9780374537289

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96 Pages

$14.00

CA$19.50

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A National Book Critics Circle Award Winner in Poetry
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in Poetry

In House of Lords and Commons, the revelatory and vital new collection of poems from the winner of the 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award in poetry, Ishion Hutchinson returns to the difficult beauty of the Jamaican landscape with remarkable lyric precision. Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.

These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.

Reviews

Praise for House of Lords and Commons

"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

Reviews from Goodreads

About the author

Ishion Hutchinson

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His poetry collection Far District (2010) won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and House of Lords and Commons (2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Other honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner journal, and the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize. He is an assistant professor of English at Cornell University.