Nomenclature New and Collected Poems..., Dionne Brand
Nomenclature New and Collected Poems..., Dionne Brand
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Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems

Author: Dionne Brand

Narrator: Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe

Unabridged: 13 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/09/2022


Synopsis

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.

About The Author

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Andrea

I ordered this book to my local bookstore, even though I knew I already have most of the books that are within this collection. Honestly I haven't read the whole book yet. I bought it for the new poetry and the forward which I loved. I've also been rereading some of the writing that I haven't read s......more

Goodreads review by Paul

A brilliant poet with a significant career. This book is a titanic achievement.......more

Goodreads review by Caleb

An essential read. All too relevant for today. In a world trying to cling to a superficial fluff, Brand’s perspective has the breadth and depth of deeper meaning that only a person of intersecting marginalities could voice. Chilling and all-too-real, these poems embody the struggles that people face......more