Released 30th September, 2022 // 80 pages // 978-1-915079-38-1
Narcissus, from 2021 OCM Bocas Prize winner Andre Bagoo, is a typically brilliant work of poetry bringing together strands of the queer, nature, and the Narcissus myth, whether in ekphrasis or otherwise. In this powerful collection, Bagoo examines the varied dynamics of the body and mind with the narcissism of the soul, while fully embracing the work of art as a critical reflection on the human condition.
PRAISE for Narcissus:
Beautiful, angry, redolent with transporting detail and memory. Bagoo’s work makes yearning, nostalgia, love, even disappointment sing off the page with a painterly, intertextual sensibility very much his own: ‘the thing that breaks you is all there is’. I love this collection.
— LUKE KENNARD, NOTES ON THE SONNETS
In Andre Bagoo’s newest collection, Narcissus, the lyric dances beautifully between the twin flames of violence and desire. Elegant in its brutality, in its mastery of line and of longing. This book is formally dexterous and queers mythology in order to excavate inheritance and rename the present.
— SAM SAX, BURY IT
Mirrors and reflections abound in Andre Bagoo’s sensuous, seriously playful and playfully serious collection. From mealy bugs and termites, Mora trees and carnival bats, there’s a deep connection between human and more-than-human experiences on Trinidad – ‘my island’ where you should, however, ‘not trust the plants’. A swirling lyric entanglement of human and nonhuman bodies with climate, politics, histories.
Echoes of echoes resonate through these poems ‘made beautiful by constraint’, where love and sexuality thrive in the shadow of structural violences: ‘these people dancing […] as though parts of a collective wet dream’. Bagoo’s poems ask how we can truly see and adore our queerest selves, looking back, in the mirrors of material and visual culture, complex ‘natures’, and lovers in who, ‘what was found in me, / Was found in him, was himself’.
— CALEB PARKIN, THIS FRUITING BODY
PRAISE for Andre Bagoo:
Any book of queer stories with a Kate Bush title reference has a lot to live up to, but Bagoo's collection–witty, intelligent, humane–is so inventive, so full of surprises at every turn, that I found myself wanting to return to his voice again and again. Bagoo is working out queer cultural concerns in an honest way here, and it's truly exciting to witness his rare talent developing with each story. Read this now.
- GARRARD CONLEY, BOY ERASED, ON THE DREAMING
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 ON THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
Bagoo’s understated music combines with striking imagery; subtle and various, he explores attachments, delusions, obsessions, hauntings, rituals, griefs and dreams.
- MICHAEL LOVEDAY REVIEWS BURN IN MAGMA
