Nomenclature

“Dionne Brand is without question one of the major living poets in the English language. While her individual collections speak for themselves in terms of their excellence and aesthetic and cultural significance, Nomenclature offers readers the fullest gathering of them and provides a survey of her development and trajectory as a poet. Featuring Christina Sharpe’s superb critical introduction, this authoritative volume is an invaluable and important text for her fans, poetry readers, literary scholars, and those working in Canadian, Caribbean, Black, American, women’s and gender, and cultural studies. Any reader will benefit from having a copy in their hands.” - John Keene, author of Punks: New and Selected Poems

"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

"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

"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

"Brand’s genius becomes manifest in works by turns wide, exuberant, lush, conversational, epic, operatic, dramatic, mournful, and defiant. Flowing from the sonic and formal experiments of her earlier books, a subtle syncopation ripples across line breaks and stanzas, smoldering like lava. Her writing gives form to a distinctive, embodied prose-poetry, queered in both the broadest and most intimate senses of welcoming all possibilities, differences, imagined futures, rhetorics, and nomenclatures. In the process Brand crafts an intentional, quotidian poetics in a series of dazzling, innovative, and visionary forms." - Michael Joyce, American Book Review