Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet), the sophomore poetry collection by Jamaica-born, UK-based Jason Allen-Paisant, reinvents the damning stereotype of Othello’s Moor, in experimental and ekphrastic verses. Thinking with Trees, Allen-Paisant’s first book of poems, won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry: his second collection is as sensitively wrought, more directly interfacing with the politics of Blackness and the hypersexualization of the Black male body. The poems travel through seventeenth-century Venice, morphing into the anthropocene: daring and inventive, they ask searing questions of desire, governable selves, and the act of possessing another.