Fugitive Tilts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Ishion Hutchinson is the Jamaican poet’s debut book of essays, composed in a tone at once meditative and expansive, as Hutchinson muses on history, race, travel, and his life in reading. The sea, as ancestral repository and pervasive metaphor, reoccurs in several of the essays—as cautionary tale, as indictment, and as a renewing, complicated promise. From Jamaica to Senegal, Hutchinson’s global sojourns bear significantly on the framing of Fugitive Tilts, which share how an identity is made from a series of patterns, ones shaped by empire, privilege (or the lack thereof), decolonial frameworks, and positions towards power.