During National Poetry Month, join RI Poet Laureate Colin Channer as he reads from his new book, CONSOLE. This event is free and open to the public, and will be in PPL’s Mural Room (3rd floor); reservations appreciated and seating is limited.  Register at: https://provlib.libcal.com/event/12177116

Books will be available for sale and signing, thanks to our friends at Barrington Books.

Assured but chance-inflected, ever rooted in the local but always world-aware, Console reconsiders languages, geographies, and memories as luminous soundscapes. With lyric dexterity, Colin Channer jolts old notions of New England, cross-fading from the Berkshires to Anguilla, from Connecticut to Senegal. A dissolve to the poet’s childhood in Jamaica occurs after glimpsing an old record player in Providence, leading to the title poem’s meditations on reggae, religion, marriage, justice, and transgressions in the home.

With allusive links to photography, music, sea mammals, mistranslation, and the universal ritual of “the walk,” Console reorganizes our sense of time, collapses and rebreaks the remembered and certain, renames the familiar, reaches for settled etymologies, and turns words inside out.

Colin Channer born in Jamaica, and educated there, and in New York. He has published ten books as fiction writer, poet, and editor, and his prose and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Bomb, The Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Conjunctions, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly and other venues. Recent honors include a 2023 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poet’s & Writers Magazine; a 2022 Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library; a 2019 Amy Clampitt Residency; and a 2018 Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship from Brown University, where he is an associate professor in the Department of Literary Arts.