Andre Bagoo
Poet, writer, essayist, author of
THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
WHAT TOWN SAY
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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 DREAMING
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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
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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, AUTHOR OF NOTES ON THE SONNET, ON NARCISSUS
Andre Bagoo is a poet and writer from Trinidad. He's the author of several books of poetry including Trick Vessels (Shearsman, 2012), Pitch Lake (Peepal Tree Press, 2017), and Narcissus (Broken Sleep, 2022). 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.
Photo by Justin Ramcharan
POETRY
'Carnival'
Boston Review
November 2009
'White Street'
The Cincinnati Review
May 2013
'Three Poems'
The Miami Rail
Spring 2018
'Two Poems'
Caribbean Review of Books
September 2011
'Love'
Visual Verse
September 2016
'Jubilee'
Blackbox Manifold
December 2014
'Translating...'
Magma
Spring 2020
'Flying'
Cordite Poetry Review
May 2017
from 'Ibis'
Poetry
July/August 2019
'Not all...'
The Poetry Review
Winter 2016
'Cherry'
Hawai'i Review
February 2018
from 'Ibis'
The Poetry Review
Summer 2018
NEWS AND EVENTS
•Read the 2022 Summer Issue of The Poetry Review, guest edited by me and Richard Scott.
•An essay from THE UNDISCOVERD COUNTRY has been named a Notable Essay of 2020 by by Robert Atwan in the BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS series.
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• My essay on Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha appears over at the latest issue of Brick.
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• I've new poetry in the latest issue of 14poems, harana poetry as well as over at Writer's Mosaic where I recently collaborated with the Trinidadian poet Shivanee Ramlochan.
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•I write about the incredible poet Serge Neptune over at Tentacular.
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•My poem 'Woodbrook Eclogue' appears in the latest issue of PN Review.
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•I was asked to select one poem from The Poetry Review’s archives and write a close reading of it. I chose Seán Hewitt’s ‘Epithalamium’. Here’s what I wrote.
•It gives me great pleasure to say I've been shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for my story 'Hunger'.
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•THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY has won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Non-fiction category
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•An extract from THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY appears in the Winter 2020 issue of The Poetry Review.
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•Poet and novelist Tishani Doshi names THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY one of her Best Books of 2020.
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•THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY makes Rajiv Mohabir's Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2020 reading list!
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•I review Peter Gizzi, Astra Papachristodoulou and Kenneth Goldsmith's massive book on Wittgenstein in the latest and final issue of Colin Lee Marshall’s Erotoplasty, published out of Seoul. The review format here is micro, but the voyages nonetheless epic.
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•My short story, 'The Sea', is published by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation in Hemingway Shorts Vol. 5, among other finalists of their annual short-fiction prize.
•Read my reviews of Roger Robinson and Richard Georges in Newsday, as well as reviews of Marvin Thompson and John Robert Lee.
•Listen to me reading new poetry over at MAGMA where I've two poems in the latest issue.
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•An essay from THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY appears over at ELECTRIC LITERATURE.
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•An extract from my poem 'Ibis' appears in the July/August issue of POETRY.
•For World Poetry Day 2019, I was asked by Dazed and Confused to say what political poetry means to me. Here’s what I said.
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