Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems
Poetry
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
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.