Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems
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 labors 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; and 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 is 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.
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"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" (10/17/2022 12:00:00 AM)
"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" (10/21/2022 12:00:00 AM)
"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" (12/13/2022 12:00:00 AM)
"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" (2/9/2023 12:00:00 AM)
