Providential - Colin Channer

Longlisted for 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature! Channer’s debut poetry collection achieves an intimate and lyric meditation on family, policing, loss, and violence, but the work is enlivened by humour, tenderness, and the rich possibilities that come from honest reflection.

Channer’s debut poetry collection achieves an intimate and lyric meditation on family, policing, loss, and violence, but the work is enlivened by humour, tenderness, and the rich possibilities that come from honest reflection. Combined with a capacity to offer physical landscapes with painterly sensitivity and care, a graceful mining of the nuances of Jamaican patwa and American English, and a judicious use of metaphor and similie, Providential is a work of “heartical” insight and vulnerability

No one, since Claude McKay’s folksy Constab Ballads of 1912, has attempted to tackle the unlikely literary figure of the Jamaican policeman. Now, over a century later, drawing on his own family knowledge of the world of the police,