Dionne Brand is the author of numerous volumes of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her latest poetry collection, The Blue Clerk, also published by Duke University Press, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Award. Her other poetry collections have won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Brand’s novel, Theory, won the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction and the Toronto Book Award, and What We All Long For won the Toronto Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. From 2009 to 2012 Brand served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. In 2021 Brand was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Fiction. She lives in Toronto.Christina Sharpe is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University and author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, also published by Duke University Press.

"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 . . . 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) "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) "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)

• Introduction / Christina Sharpe  xviiNomenclature for the Time Being  1Primitive Offensive  71Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia  119Winter Epigrams  121Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia  141Chronicles of the Hostile Sun  163Languages  165Sieges  181Military Occupations  188No Language is Neutral  223Hard Against the Soul I  225Return  227No Language is Neutral  238Hard Against the Soul  251Land to Light On  269I Have Been Losing Roads  271All That Has Happened Since  286Land to Light On  305Dialectics  311Islands Vanish  330Through My Imperfect Mouth and Life and Way  335Every Chapter of the World  341Thirsty  357Inventory  411Ossuaries  497Notes  615Acknowledgments  619

Dionne Brand is the author of numerous volumes of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her latest poetry collection, The Blue Clerk, also published by Duke University Press, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Award. Her other poetry collections have won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Brand’s novel, Theory, won the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction and the Toronto Book Award, and What We All Long For won the Toronto Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. From 2009 to 2012 Brand served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. In 2021 Brand was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Fiction. She lives in Toronto.Christina Sharpe is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University and author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, also published by Duke University Press.

"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 . . . 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) "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) "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)

• Introduction / Christina Sharpe  xviiNomenclature for the Time Being  1Primitive Offensive  71Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia  119Winter Epigrams  121Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia  141Chronicles of the Hostile Sun  163Languages  165Sieges  181Military Occupations  188No Language is Neutral  223Hard Against the Soul I  225Return  227No Language is Neutral  238Hard Against the Soul  251Land to Light On  269I Have Been Losing Roads  271All That Has Happened Since  286Land to Light On  305Dialectics  311Islands Vanish  330Through My Imperfect Mouth and Life and Way  335Every Chapter of the World  341Thirsty  357Inventory  411Ossuaries  497Notes  615Acknowledgments  619