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 connects
language coloniality and sexuality. Land to Light On explores intimacies and disaffections
with nationality and the nation-state 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.
