Nomenclature

Trenchant, lyrical and breathtaking in its cinematic sweep, the first UK poetry publication by the Canadian national treasure

Dionne Brand's poetry makes scalar leaps from the 'eroding present' and the 'intimacy of history' to 'unknown galaxies' and 'as yet / unarmed moons'. With a consciousness 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. Brand is, in other words, a poet engagé, and hers is a poetics of liberation; she does not 'write toward anything called justice, but against tyranny'.

With a critical introduction by scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe, Nomenclature is the searing new volume spanning a decades-long career, from 1982-2022, and gathering the new and collected poems of one of Canada's most honoured, significant and bestselling poets. Here, Dionne Brand bears powerful witness to the seemingly unending wars, the ascendance of fundamentalisms and the nameless casualties of the current era, but also to the rich textures of human life and human feeling that, in the face of this world's violences, endure and flourish.

It is a masterwork, classic and living, and a record of one of the great writers of our age.