The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams

by Jason Allen-Paisant

Finalist for the 2025 Wainwright Prize in Nature Writing

"Extraordinary . . . Surprising at every turn and rewarding in ways you never expect."—Marlon James

“An extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer. A new song of the earth.”—Robert Macfarlane

From an exciting new voice in international literature, a profoundly moving memoir that explores the Black experience in the natural world and the transformative power of plants.

Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. The cycles of his boyhood revolved around tending the plots of cabbage, tomatoes, and yams dotting the clay hillsides; playing beneath the cavernous roots of cotton trees; and climbing trunks of the fruit trees that fed him and his grandmother. But as a student of the literature of colonial England, in which the landscape of heather and moors has long been thought of as ideal, these years of subsistence and community evoked more shame than pride, and a language for the natural world that surrounded him remained elusive.

Years after leaving the island to attend university in England, and eventually achieving a position as a lecturer in Leeds, he finds himself “alienated from land, from planting, from watching things grow.” Walking among the trees in Yorkshire, he wonders how his own body will be perceived and can’t help but think of the epidemic of anti-Black violence across the Western world. He returns to Jamaica and the intimate archives of knowledge in his late grandmother’s grung, determined to reclaim his cultural inheritance, and ultimately to rediscover a “second life of seeing,” based on old ways of knowing.

“A beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning” (Kwame Dawes), The Possibility of Tenderness is a book for our time.

251 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 9, 2025

Reviews

[Michael Doane · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Possibility of Tenderness is a luminous and intellectually daring memoir that reimagines what nature writing can be and who it belongs to. Jason Allen Paisant writes with rare sensitivity about land, memory, and Black interior life, offering a work that is as philosophically rigorous as it is emotionally resonant.

Rooted in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica and extending to the landscapes of northern England, this memoir examines how colonial education, racialized perceptions of space, and academic displacement fracture one’s relationship to the natural world. Allen Paisant’s return to his grandmother’s grung is not nostalgic but restorative an act of cultural recovery that insists on the legitimacy of inherited, embodied knowledge.

What makes this book exceptional is its refusal of easy resolutions. Instead, it unfolds as a process of learning to see again through plants, labor, language, and silence. Allen-Paisant interrogates whose bodies are permitted tenderness in nature, and whose intimacy with land has historically been erased or rendered invisible.

At once lyrical, political, and contemplative, The Possibility of Tenderness stands among the most important works of contemporary nature writing. It is a book that does not simply describe the world, but changes how readers are invited to inhabit it.

[Jessica Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

…. a second life of “seeing”

Joy is not passive; it is land made fertile by tenderness, care, community, and imagination.