Search results for ""author andre bagoo""

'A manifesto, a literary criticism, a personal chronicle of literary life, a book of days, a stage wherein famous writers such as Walcott, Thomas, Gunn, Espada, and others become actors, The Undiscovered Country discovers many things, but one thing for sure: Andre Bagoo is a fearless, brilliant mind. He can take us from the formal critical perspective to new futurist "visual essay", to verse essay, to sweeping historical account that is unafraid to go as far in time as Columbus and as urgently-of-our moment as Brexit—all of it with precision and attentiveness to detail that is as brilliant as it is startling. Bravo.' — Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in OdessaAndre Bagoo is the real deal as an essayist in that he asks interesting questions (was there an alternative to the independence that Trinidad sought and gained in 1962?) and is open to seeing where his ideas take him – quite often to unexpected places. He displays an intense interest in the world around him – including literature, art, film, food, politics, even Snakes and Ladders – but is just as keen to share with the reader some sense of how his point of view has been constructed. He writes as a gay man who grew up in a country that still has colonial laws against gay sexuality, as a man whose ethnic heritage was both African and Indian in a country whose politics have been stymied by its ethnic divisions. And just what were the effects of repeat-watching a defective video of The Sound of Music, truncated at a crucial moment? There is an engaging personality present here, a sharp and enquiring mind, and ample evidence that he knows how to write shapely sentences and construct well-formed essays. Encyclopaedic knowledge is rarely the point of the essay, but few readers will leave this collection without feeling better informed and more curious about their worlds.

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These stories have the virtue of taking the everyday lives of gay Trinidadian men utterly for granted in their searches for adventure, pleasure, self-realisation, loving contact and sex. Written with a sharpness of perception and in a variety of engaging personal voices, these narratives find room for humour, tragic haircuts, and a connection between tattoos and terrible poetry. But they also acknowledge very real fears in a society where there is still prejudice, discrimination and homophobic violence. The narrator of several of these pieces is a writer who wants to focus on the pleasures and inner dramas of these lives as the truth about gay experience. But there are also the stories of brutal murders reported with coy innuendo in the press. If he is tempted to see his lovers as characters in a witty fiction of manners, is this the novel that can be written in Trinidad? And since this is Trinidad, could the conflicted, self-hating Dorian really be a serial killer? But then when one of Bagoo’s writer narrators unwittingly alarms his writing buddies by the freedom of his gothic imagination, who knows what might be true. Not for nothing does the author include the singer Kate Bush with her Wuthering Heights in his acknowledgements. Bagoo’s stories offer a witty and incisive portrait of contemporary Trinidad in all its intersections of race, class and gender politics. Not least, they have a strong sense of place – Bagoo’s gay Woodbrook offers a fine sequel to V.S. Naipaul’s Woodbrook in his classic Miguel Street.

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In Pitch Lake, Andre Bagoo, author of the Bocas prize shortlisted poetry collection, Burn, displays a continuing commitment to exploration and experiment.Andre Bagoo has been awarded The Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize for first-time publication in The Caribbean Writer for 'On Wordsworth's The Daffodils', a poem from Pitch Lake. You can download the poem below.Divided into three sections , Andre Bagoo’s poems explore the multiple resonances of the words, where pitch signifies both the stickiness of memory – the way the La Brea Pitch Lake is a place where “buried trees [are] born again” – and the idea of scattering: of places and impressions and the effort to hold them in one vision. The first part brings together poems that encompass reflections on art; Trinidad as a fallen Eden with its history of slavery and the inhumanity of “cachots brulants”; Black Lives Matter; visits to Britain and the image of cows “straight out of Hardy”; and poems about finding love in a climate of homophobia. Poems with an elaborated discursive structure sit next to little imagist poems written in response to Trinidad’s disappearing fauna and threatened eco-system."Lake", is a sequence of prose poems, varying in length, some surreal, suggestive rather than explicit, presenting subtly dislocated narratives that, even in a short space, disrupt the reader’s expectations of where they are heading. In their brevity, these prose pieces offer surfaces, like that of a lake, that invite the reader to wonder what lies underneath but warn that this is not necessarily what is most predictable. In Pitch Lake, Andre Bagoo, author of the Bocas prize shortlisted poetry collection, Burn, displays a continuing commitment to exploration and experiment.

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