Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems

Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brands 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, Brands 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 Brands diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters. In addition to this searing new work, Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Brands 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 flneur 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 worldspast, present, and future. This masterwork displays Dionne Brands ongoing body of thoughttrenchant, 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.