Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His second book, House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His first collection, Far District (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Hutchinson received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2013, and was a 2014 […]
The streetlights shed pearls that night, above the hot mint, the sky quivered, a man heard his true love’s name, the stray dogs ran but did not bark at the strange shadows that night, the Minister of All could not sleep, mosquitoes swarmed around his net, his portrait and his pitcher and drinking glass, the […]
for Dante Micheaux No bitterness comes out of thin slices of lemon loaf you cut at the kitchen window as I watch from the sofa, thinking: ‘the light catches and frames perfect each object: bread, knife, and Dante.’ August bends on the stoop, paying another visit to my years, my fourth summer in New York. […]
She would announce from her yard before one dropped, sending us in a flurry through the fence under the mango tree, heads up for the blind fruit that would come tearing down the branches. Falling on knees, we would go helter-skelter in the grass, until someone lifted the yellow trophy high before running off, teeth […]
Horace My cousin, born February, can’t read this apology signed with two fishes: sorry for feeding you the poison bread, a Roman deed. Piscis Austrinus, you will meet a water-bearer, sent to wash your feet, she will dry them with her head cloth, hold you like a mother—be her son, cousin, so you will never […]
Ishion Hutchinson Q&A on a poem he wishes he’d written, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Felix Randal.”
Ishion Hutchinson recommends two poets for Fishouse visitors to explore, British poets Basil Bunting and George Barker.