Review
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
About the Author
Andre Bagoo is a poet and writer from Trinidad, the author of several books of poetry including Trick Vessels (2012), BURN (Shearsman, 2015) and Pitch Lake (Peepal Tree Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Cincinnati Review, St Petersburg Review, PN Review, POETRY, and The Poetry Review. He was awarded The Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize in 2017.His essay collection, The Undiscovered Country, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2020 and won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction. His fiction debut, The Dreaming, is forthcoming from Peepal Tree.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, AUTHOR OF BOY ERASED, ON THE DREAMINGA 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 COUNTRYBagoo'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
