An award-winning poet living in Roundhay Park, Leeds, Jason Allen-Paisant spent his early childhood living with his grandmother in Coffee Grove, a hilly rural district of Jamaica which was cut off from basic amenities such as electricity and water. Seen through the eyes of a child, Coffee Grove was, he notes, “both a tiny place and a huge planet”. There he developed a close relationship with the local plant life through climbing trees, picking fruit and helping his grandmother harvest yams on the “grung”, the local name for their small plot of land.
Allen-Paisant later yearned for pastures fresh, moving first to Paris and then to Britain to study at Oxford. His dream of upward mobility had become a reality, yet in the UK he noticed his interactions with nature were few and far between. He came to realise “just how much class keeps people in Britain from the privileges of land and soil and also keeps them from the tenderness that comes with forming kinship with the earth”.
The Possibility of Tenderness is, then, an account of Allen-Paisant’s relationship with the land where he grew up and in his adopted home. Read with warmth and thoughtfulness by the author, the book contains meditations on nature, history, race and the notion of belonging. Allen-Paisant explains how the impulse to surround himself with nature allows him to feel hopeful and “find ways of living through – if not beyond – the constraints of racism”.
During Jason Allen-Paisant’s early childhood in Coffee Grove, the area had no electricity or piped water. Neither beach idyll nor Trenchtown ghetto, its personality was shaped in large part by “grung” – the local name for small plots cultivated by peasant farmers. Apples, guava, mangoes: here, for all the sweat and toil, was succulence. And memories of feeling connected – to the ground, to the past, to kinfolk.
Education was Allen-Paisant’s passport. He moved away – to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Later Oxford. He didn’t shed his past entirely, though: a study of Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire was subtitled Thinking With Spirits; a volume of his own poems was called Thinking With Trees. Returning to Jamaica from Leeds where he lives, his new book attempts to reckon with Coffee Grove. This involves deep time: it emerged from the ocean, a bed of limestone, more than 15m years ago. Slavery, understood in environmental terms, sculpts and embeds itself in the landscape, too.
The Possibility of Tenderness is also about nature, its setting Coffee Grove 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.
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.
The Possibility of Tenderness is a book for our time. A beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning.
Finalist for the 2025 Wainwright Prize in Nature Writing.
Published by Milkweed Editions on September 9, 2025, the book spans 264 pages with dimensions of 8.5 × 5 inches.
ISBN 9781639551576.
“Extraordinary … Surprising at every turn and rewarding in ways you never expect.”—Marlon James
“A beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning” (Kwame Dawes).
Warmth and thoughtfulness … Jason Allen-Paisant. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer
View image in fullscreen
Warmth and thoughtfulness … Jason Allen-Paisant. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer
The poet reconnects with the landscape of the May Day Mountains in Jamaica where he grew up in a personal story of migration, race and rural life.
An award-winning poet living in Roundhay Park, Leeds, Jason Allen-Paisant spent his early childhood living with his grandmother in Coffee Grove, a hilly rural district of Jamaica which was cut off from basic amenities such as electricity and water.
Seen through the eyes of a child, Coffee Grove was, he notes, “both a tiny place and a huge planet”. There he developed a close relationship with the local plant life through climbing trees, picking fruit and helping his grandmother harvest yams on the “grung”, the local name for their small plot of land.
Allen-Paisant later yearned for pastures new, moving first to Paris and then to Britain to study at Oxford. His dream of upward mobility had become a reality, yet in the UK he noticed his interactions with nature were few and far between. He came to realise “just how much class keeps people in Britain from the privileges of land and soil and also keeps them from the tenderness that comes with forming kinship with the earth”.
The Possibility of Tenderness is, then, an account of Allen-Paisant’s relationship with the land where he grew up and in his adopted home. Read with warmth and thoughtfulness by the author, the book contains meditations on nature, history, race and the notion of belonging. Allen-Paisant explains how the impulse to surround himself with nature allows him to feel hopeful and “find ways of living through – if not beyond – the constraints of racism”.
During Jason Allen-Paisant’s early childhood in Coffee Grove, the area had no electricity or piped water. Neither beach idyll nor Trenchtown ghetto, its personality was shaped in large part by “grung” – the local name for small plots cultivated by peasant farmers. Apples, guava, mangoes: here, for all the sweat and toil, was succulence. And memories of feeling connected – to the ground, to the past, to kinfolk.
Education was Allen-Paisant’s passport. He moved away – to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Later Oxford. He didn’t shed his past entirely, though: a study of Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire was subtitled Thinking With Spirits; a volume of his own poems was called Thinking With Trees. Returning to Jamaica from Leeds where he lives, his new book attempts to think with Coffee Grove. This involves deep time: it emerged from the ocean, a bed of limestone, more than 15m years ago. Slavery, understood in environmental terms, sculpts and embeds itself in the landscape, too.
The Possibility of Tenderness is also about nature, its setting Coffee Grove 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.
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.
The Possibility of Tenderness is a book for our time. A beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning.
Finalist for the 2025 Wainwright Prize in Nature Writing.
Published by Milkweed Editions on September 9, 2025, the book spans 264 pages with dimensions of 8.5 × 5 inches.
ISBN 9781639551576.
“Extraordinary … Surprising at every turn and rewarding in ways you never expect.”—Marlon James
“A beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning” (Kwame Dawes).
Warmth and thoughtfulness … Jason Allen-Paisant. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer
View image in fullscreen
Warmth and thoughtfulness … Jason Allen-Paisant. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer