Fugitive Tilts: Essays

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: 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 across 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 sea: its sound, its geography, and, as Hutchinson writes, its “memory in motion.”