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Showing 1 - 20 of 31 items
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Award winning non-fiction, Canadian non-fiction, Canadian authors (Non-fiction), Literature, Poetry
Human-narrated audio
At the centre of this poem is the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing from past…
actions and regrets, in a perpetual state of movement. While living in solitude, she crosses borders actual (Algiers, Cuba, Canada), and timeless. Cold-eyed and cynical, she contemplates the periodic crises of the contemporary world. Descriptions of sex and violence, some strong language. 2010.
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Canadian fiction, Canadian authors (Fiction)
Human-narrated audio
Intersecting stories of people caught in the middle of choices, apprehensions and fears. Each of the tales here - June's,…
Bedri's, Da'uud's, Lia's - opens a different window on the city they all live in, mostly in parallel, but occasionally, delicately, touching and crossing one another. c2014.
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Canadian fictionAward winning non-fiction, Canadian non-fiction, Canadian authors (Non-fiction), Literature, Poetry
Human-narrated audio
Brand writes about Canada as it is seen by an outsider and about the outsiders who have come here over…
and settled over the years, uncomfortable with the land and its people, uncomfortable sometimes with themselves. Winner of the 1997 Governor General's Award for English poetry.
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Canadian fiction, Canadian authors (Fiction), Family stories
Human-narrated audio
In 1824, on the island of Trinidad, Marie Ursule arranges a mass suicide among the slaves as an act of…
revolt. However, she cannot bring herself to kill her own daughter, Bola. She is smuggled away and from here begins a story of six generations of Marie Ursule's family as they spread to America, Canada and Europe. Their lives continue to be haunted, and vindicated, by Marie Ursule's dreams and her passion as the story moves through two World Wars and into the violence and confusion of the twentieth century. Some strong language.
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Biography, Literature biography, Women biography, Canadian biography, Canadian non-fiction, Canadian authors (Non-fiction)
Human-narrated audio
A timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing…
world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. 2001.
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY audio (CD), DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Canadian fiction, Canadian authors (Fiction), General fiction
Human-narrated audio, Human-transcribed braille
Theory begins as its narrator sets out, like many a graduate student, to write a wildly ambitious thesis on the…
past, present, and future of art, culture, race, gender, class, and politics--a revolutionary work that its author believes will synthesize and thereby transform the world. While our narrator tries to complete this magnum opus, three lovers enter the story, one after the other, each transforming the endeavour: first, there is beautiful and sensual Selah, who scoffs at the narrator's constant tinkering with academic abstractions; then altruistic and passionate Yara, who rescues every lost soul who crosses her path; and finally, spiritual occultist Odalys, who values magic and superstition over the heady intellectual and cultural circles the narrator aspires to inhabit. Each galvanizing love affair (representing, in turn, the heart, the head and the spirit) upends and reorients the narrator's life and, inevitably, requires an overhaul of the ever larger and more unwieldy dissertation, with results both humorous and poignant. 2018.
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Canadian fiction, Family stories, General fiction, Multi-cultural fiction
Human-narrated audio
The overlapping lives of four twenty-somethings: Tuyen is the lesbian daughter of Vietnamese parents who've never recovered from losing one…
of their children; Carla, who's still reeling from her mother's suicide; Oku, a jazz-loving poet in conflict with his father and in love with Jackie, who is a black woman who dates only white men. The fifth character is Quy, the child Tuyen's parents lost. A member of the Thai underworld, he will soon be reunited with his family, but is it to love them or hurt them? 2005.
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Canadian non-fiction, Canadian authors (Non-fiction), Literature, Poetry
Human-narrated audio
This anthology features the work of 18 emerging Toronto talents writing about their city: Diana Biacora, David Bradford, Nicole Chin,…
Simone Dalton, Dalton Derkson, Doyali Islam, Laboni Islam, Ian Kamau, Adnan Khan, Shoilee Khan, Canisia Lubrin, Sofia Mostaghimi, Nadia Ragbar, Rudrapriya Rathore, Sanchari Sur, Katheryn Wabegijig, Phoebe Wang, and Chuqiao Yang. 2017.
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Canadian non-fiction, Canadian authors (Non-fiction), Literature, Poetry, Award winning non-fiction
Human-narrated audio
On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink-blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's…
accumulated left-hand pages—the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained, the word-shard. In The Blue Clerk renowned poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet's pages. In their dialogues—which take shape as a series of haunting prose poems—the poet and the clerk invoke a host of writers, philosophers, and artists, from Jacob Lawrence, Lola Kiepja, and Walter Benjamin to John Coltrane, Josephine Turalba, and Jorge Luis Borges. Through these essay poems, Brand explores memory, language, culture, and time while intimately interrogating the act and difficulty of writing, the relationship between the poet and the world, and the link between author and art. Winner of the 2019 Trillium Book Award. 2018.
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Poetry
Human-narrated audio
Dionne Brand’s hypnotic, urgent long poem – her first book of poetry in four years, is about the bones of…
fading cultures and ideas, about the living museums of spectacle where these bones are found. At the centre of Ossuaries is the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing from past actions and regrets, in a perpetual state of movement. She leads a solitary clandestine life, crossing borders actual (Algiers, Cuba, Canada), and timeless. Cold-eyed and cynical, she contemplates the periodic crises of the contemporary world. This is a work of deep engagement, sensuality, and ultimate craft from an essential observer of our time and one of the most accomplished poets writing today.
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Poetry
Human-narrated audio
Griffin Poetry Prize winner Dionne Brand's startlingly original work about the act of writing itself.On a lonely wharf a clerk…
in an ink blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages--the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained. In The Blue Clerk, award-winning poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet's pages. In their dialogues--which take shape as a series of haunting prose poems--the poet and the clerk invoke a host of writers, philosophers, and artists, from Jacob Lawrence, Lola Keipja, and Walter Benjamin to John Coltrane, Josephine Turalba, and Jorge Luis Borges. Through these essay poems, Brand explores memory, language, culture, and time, offering beautiful and jarring juxtapositions ("The Wire is the latest version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"), and endlessly haunting language ("On a road like this you don't know where you are. Whether you have arrived or whether you are still on your way. Whether you are still at the beginning or at the end. You are in the middle all the time. What would be the sign?").An essential observer and one of the most accomplished poets writing today, Dionne Brand's latest engages intimately with the act and difficulty of writing, the relationship between the author and the world, and the relationship between the author and art. Profound, moving, and wise in equal parts, The Blue Clerk is a work of staggering intellect and imagination, and a truly sublime piece of writing from one of Canada's most renowned, honoured, and bestselling poets.
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Criticism
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How Black life is made and unmade by and in literature; arguing for new vocabularies.
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Poetry
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An immense achievement, comprising a decades-long career—new and collected poetry from one of Canada’s most honoured and significant poets.Spanning almost…
four decades, Dionne Brand’s poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness that is attuned to this world and open to some other, possibly future, time and place, Brand’s ongoing labours of witness and imagination speak directly to where and how we live and reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems begins with a new long poem, the titular "Nomenclature for the Time Being," in which Dionne Brand’s diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters. In addition to this searing new work, Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Brand’s poetry published between 1982 and 2010 and includes a critical introduction by the literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, features the searching and centering cantos of Primitive Offensive; the sharp musical conversations of Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia; the documentary losses of revolutions in Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in which "The street was empty/with all of us standing there." No Language Is Neutral reads language, coloniality, and sexuality as a nexus. Land to Light On writes intimacies and disaffections with nation, while in thirsty a cold-eyed flâneur surveys the workings of the city. In Inventory, written during the Gulf Wars, the poet is "the wars’ last and late night witness," her job not to soothe but to "revise and revise this bristling list/hourly." Ossuaries’ futurist speaker rounds out the collection, and threads multiple temporal worlds—past, present, and future. This masterwork displays Dionne Brand’s ongoing body of thought—trenchant, lyrical, absonant, discordant, and meaning-making. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems is classic and living, a record of one of the great writers of our age.
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Serious and literary fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction, Friendship stories
Human-narrated audio
From our acclaimed poet and novelist: a gem of a novel that sizzles about love--between lovers, between friends, and for…
the places we live in--and pays homage to each moment of experience. Love lasted only one year but the time felt like several springs strung together. In Love Enough, the sharp beauty of Brand's writing draws us effortlessly into the intersecting stories of her characters caught in the middle of choices, apprehensions, fears. Each of the tales here--June's, Bedri's, Da'uud's, Lia's opens a different window on the city they all live in, mostly in parallel, but occasionally, delicately, touching and crossing one another. Each story radiates other stories. In these pages, the urban landscape cannot be untangled from the emotional one; they mingle, shift and cleave to one another. The young man Bedri experiences the terrible isolation brought about by an act of violence, while his father, Da'uud, casualty of a geopolitical conflict, driving a taxi, is witness to curious gestures of love and anger; Lia faces the sometimes unbridgeable chasms of family; and fierce June, ambivalent and passionate with her string of lovers, now in middle age discovers: "There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business. It is hard if you really want to do it right." Brand is our greatest observer--of actions, of emotions, of the little things that often go unnoticed but can mean the turn of a day. At once lucid and dream-like, Love Enough is a profoundly modern work that speaks to the most fundamental questions of how we live now.
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LGBTQ+ fiction, General fiction, Serious and literary fiction
Human-narrated audio
A smart, sensual and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course. This…
compact tour de force affirms Dionne Brand's place as one of Canada's most dazzling and influential artists. By effortlessly telling this short, intense tale in the voice of an unnamed, ungendered (and brilliantly unreliable) narrator, Dionne Brand makes a bold statement not only about love and personhood, but about race and gender—and what can and cannot be articulated in prose when the forces that inhabit the space between words are greater than words themselves. A gorgeous, profoundly moving, word—and note—perfect novel of ideas that only a great artist at the height of her powers could write.
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Customs and cultures, Anthologies, Journals and memoirs, Social issues
Human-narrated audio
Bread Out of Stone is an original and forceful study of race, sex and politics in contemporary culture. Personal and…
poetic, these essays speak of matters close to the heart of a black writer. This evocative and insightful collection has been fully updated and includes four previously unpublished essays. She turns her clear, unflinching eye to issues of sex and sexism; male violence toward women; how Black women learn the erotic; the stereotypes of Black females in popular culture and the centrality of Whiteness in definitions of Canadian culture. And she examines her personal history.
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Journals and memoirs, Women biography, Biography
Human-narrated audio
A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity…
and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history—the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.
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Serious and literary fiction, Short stories, Multi-cultural fiction
Human-narrated audio
The breathtaking debut short story collection—first published in 1989—from one of Canada's most original and influential writers. Newly available in…
a special reissue edition from Knopf Canada. "This is political art at its searing best."—The Women's Review of BooksSince her the appearance of her novel In Another Place, Not Here, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 1998, award-winning author Dionne Brand has become one of the most revered figures in Canadian fiction. Sans Souci is Brand’s bold fiction debut, collecting eleven stories that breathe life and language into the lives of women in the Caribbean and the Black diaspora, often dealing with the process—and aftermath—of transit and arrival. Brand’s fiction dissects sexual violence, racial prejudice, and war, while attending to the full spectrum of experiences of those who live in the shadow of a shared colonial past—experiences encompassing both joy and sorrow, release and constraint. Now available for the first time in more than a decade, Sans Souci and Other Stories is a foundational work from one of our most cherished literary artists and thinkers.
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Serious and literary fiction, Historical fiction
Human-narrated audio
In 1824, on the island of Trinidad, Marie Ursule, queen of a secret society of militant slaves, plots a mass…
suicide—a quiet, passionate act of revolt. But she cannot bring herself to kill her small daughter, Bola, whom she smuggles away in the early dawn light. As Bola's children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren spill out across the world to America, Canada and Europe, they find their lives both haunted and vindicated by the dreams and passions of their defiant ancestor. The interconnected stories of six generations of Marie Ursule's descendants form a lush, beguiling and beautifully told history of dispossession, and bring this Governor General's Award-winning writer into the front rank of the world's novelists.
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LGBTQ+ fiction, General fiction, Serious and literary fiction
Human-narrated audio
Tuyen is an aspiring artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who've never recovered from losing one of their children…
while in the rush to flee Vietnam in the 1970s. She rejects her immigrant family's hard-won lifestyle, and instead lives in a rundown apartment with friends—each of whom is grappling with their own familial complexities and heartache. By turns thrilling and heartbreaking, Tuyen's lost brother—who has since become a criminal in the Thai underworld—journeys to Toronto to find his long-lost family. As Quy's arrival nears, tensions build, friendships are tested, and an unexpected encounter will forever alter the lives of Tuyen and her friends. Gripping at times, heartrending at others, What We All Long For is an ode to a generation of longing and identity, and to the rhythms and pulses of a city and its burgeoning, questioning youth.