The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams

Finalist for the 2025 Wainwright Prize in Nature Writing

"Extraordinary . . . Surprising at every turn and rewarding in ways you never expect."--Marlon James

"An extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer. A new song of the earth."--Robert Macfarlane

From an exciting new voice in international literature, a profoundly moving memoir that explores the Black experience in the natural world and the transformative power of plants.

Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. The cycles of his boyhood revolved around tending the plots of cabbage, tomatoes, and yams dotting the clay hillsides; playing beneath the cavernous roots of cotton trees; and climbing trunks of the fruit trees that fed him and his grandmother. But as a student of the literature of colonial England, in which the landscape of heather and moors has long been thought of as ideal, these years of subsistence and community evoked more shame than pride, and a language for the natural world that surrounded him remained elusive.

Years after leaving the island to attend university in England, and eventually achieving a position as a lecturer in Leeds, he finds himself "alienated from land, from planting, from watching things grow." Walking among the trees in Yorkshire, he wonders how his own body will be perceived and can't help but think of the epidemic of anti-Black violence across the Western world. He returns to Jamaica and the intimate archives of knowledge in his late grandmother's grung, determined to reclaim his cultural inheritance, and ultimately to rediscover a "second life of seeing," based on old ways of knowing.

"A beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning" (Kwame Dawes), The Possibility of Tenderness is a book for our time.

Author: Jason Allen-Paisant
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 09/09/2025
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.76lbs
Size: 8.43h x 5.51w x 0.79d
ISBN: 9781639551576


Review Citation(s):
Foreword 08/25/2025

About the Author
Allen-Paisant, Jason: - Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and award-winning poet. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry, Thinking with Trees and Self-Portrait as Othello, which won the United Kingdom's two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023--the Forward Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize. He is also a Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and Associate Editor of Callaloo Literary Journal. Jason lives in Leeds with his partner and two children.