Nomenclature: Dionne Brand in Conversation with Victoria Adukwei Bulley

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 SELECTED 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 SELECTED 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 SELECTED POEMS is classic and living, a record of one of the great writers of our age.

Dionne Brand is the author of twenty-three books of poetry, fiction and essays. She has received numerous awards, including the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. From 2009 to 2012 Brand served as Toronto's Poet Laureate, and in 2017 she was named to the Order of Canada. She lives in Toronto.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. Her work has appeared widely in publications including The White Review, the London Review of Books, and The Atlantic. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry collection, QUIET, won the Rathbones Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber & Faber in the UK and in North America by Knopf, Penguin Random House. 

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