Fugitive Tilts: Essays

by Ishion Hutchinson

Ishion Hutchinson turns his poetic sensibility to questions of home, displacement, and memory in his beautiful and searingly brilliant prose debut.In Fugitive Tilts, Ishion Hutchinson, the author House of Lords and Commons (for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry), turns to prose to create an incomplete biography of love of poetry, discovered in childhood; love of home, with its continual disconnections and returns; and love of the works and artists that look over him with “an angel’s aura,” from Treasure Island to John Coltrane.Gathering essays that range over time, place, and form, Hutchinson builds, piece by piece, a space from which the suffering of the past and the present can be reckoned with and survived. Through these pieces, he pays homage to the inheritances and influences that are part of his history and to Derek Walcott in particular, whose legacy threads through the book. Above all, Fugitive Tilts is a book suffused with the its sound, its geography, and, as Hutchinson writes, its “memory in motion.”

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

384 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 2025

About the author

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections, Far District: Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University and is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.

Reviews

[gaia ★ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sorry that I'm not the right audience for this because I'm becoming increasingly fascinated with prose written by poets, but this simply is not working for me and I can't bring myself to finish it.
These are all short essays about Hutchinson's life and general musings, but there's not much meat, if you will. It's probably an interesting enough book for people who have read his poems, or if you're also a poet and looking to get to know the contemporary poetry scene. I prefer direct thematic unpacking and structured critical essays in my non-fiction and make few exceptions -- sadly this isn't one of them. I urge you to try it out for yourself though cause this could be a me problem.

Thanks to the publisher for the e-arc.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25

Unsure whether this collection should have been as long, the thread between them felt tenuous at times and the essays on literature I just didn’t take to (probably because I have half the brain I had when I studied literature)

However, Hutchinson is a gorgeous writer. The essay about his grandma (using Vuillard’s painting) was astonishing & made me cry. The essay about Ethiopia and the couple who fed him in Senegal were pure works of art❤️‍🔥 and I loved learning about his life in Jamaica.

I’d definitely read his essays again but perhaps in their singular form.

[Damien Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very rambley and sprawling. I enjoyed learning more about Jamaica through the eyes of a young literary talent and his musings on other famous Jamaican authors caught my attention. The other essays didn't catch my attention quite as much. I wish it had been a bit neater, so to speak. It was too slow-paced for me.