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Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems

by Dionne Brand

Length 13 hours 9 minutes

Language English

Narrators Dionne Brand & Christina Sharpe

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Summary
About the author
About the narrator

An immense achievement, comprising a decades-long career—new and collected poetry from one of Canada’s most honoured and significant poets.

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, Winner
Toronto Book Award, Shortlist

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.

Poetry

DIONNE BRAND's literary credentials are legion. Her novel Theory was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Her poetry collection The Blue Clerk was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Prize. Her collection Ossuaries won the Griffin Poetry Prize, and other collections have won the Governor General's Literary Award, the Trillium Book Prize, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Among her other novels, In Another Place, Not Here was selected as a NYT Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book by the Globe and Mail; At the Full and Change of the Moon was selected as a Best Book by the LA Times; and What We All Long For won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, Brand was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the world of books and writing; from 2009 to 2012 she served as Toronto's Poet Laureate, and in 2020 she won the internationally prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. In 2017, she was named to the Order of Canada. And in 2022, she became Editorial Director of Alchemy, a line of books within Knopf Canada. She lives in Toronto.