Description
Book SynopsisNomenclature: New and Collected Poems collects eight volumes of Dionne Brand’s poetry published between 1983 and 2010, as well as a new long poem, the titular
Nomenclature for the time being.
Trade Review"Through her storytelling and activism, Brand has always found ways to respond to and reflect the times. One thread remains clear in her work: Her commitment to Toronto is her commitment to people, histories, stories and the expressions of this place and beyond. The city might try to cling to the poet and all of her magnificence, but Dionne Brand is still imagining better worlds." -- Huda Hassan * Chatelaine *
"Taken together, these poems reflect the work of someone aching to find a place where 'to be awake is / more lovely than dreams.'" -- Layla Benitez-James * Harriet *
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Nomenclature is driven by sedate yet sparkling agonies that invent and occupy the limbo between blues spaciousness and frenzied free improvisation. . . . How does a black poet deliver her perspective ceremoniously, as stark ritual, without pandering to the expectation that she dress these deliveries up in myths and larger-than-life antics so that readers do not feel implicated by direct address? Brand shows us how by doing just that and whether or not the revolution she imagined comes, this is a revolutionary act, to not act but to be so precisely that each small degree of change rivets and ripples as a self-contained justice that needs no codifying in outside laws." -- Harmony Holiday * 4Columns *
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Nomenclature . . . confirms that Brand has always been a meticulous but dynamic stylist for whom form is motivated by the desire to take 'history's pulse . . . with another hand'—to replace orthodox understandings of time and place with an art that speaks 'the whole immaculate language of the ravaged world.' . . . There is an uncensored quality to these poems, which often channel the exasperated momentum of someone eager to pull the wool off the reader's eyes." -- Anahid Nersessian * New York Review of Books *
"This expansive collection brings together eight books of poetry written over four decades. It’s a gripping catalogue of witness and a call to imagine a better world." -- Michael Holtmann * Center for the Art of Translation *
"It is, believe you me, a goddamn treat. . . . Brand is one of our greatest living poets. In artistry she has scaled the heights of a Neruda or an Eliot. An insistence on witness and liberation for all is the spine of every book. She finds innovative and exemplary language for the most painful, quotidian, and visible parts of life and political structure. Let us give her her rightful flowers already." -- Sarah Thankam Mathews * Lux *
Table of ContentsIntroduction / Christina Sharpe xvii
Nomenclature for the Time Being 1
Primitive Offensive 71
Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia 119
Winter Epigrams 121
Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia 141
Chronicles of the Hostile Sun 163
Languages 165
Sieges 181
Military Occupations 188
No Language is Neutral 223
Hard Against the Soul I 225
Return 227
No Language is Neutral 238
Hard Against the Soul 251
Land to Light On 269
I Have Been Losing Roads 271
All That Has Happened Since 286
Land to Light On 305
Dialectics 311
Islands Vanish 330
Through My Imperfect Mouth and Life and Way 335
Every Chapter of the World 341
Thirsty 357
Inventory 411
Ossuaries 497
Notes 615
Acknowledgments 619
