Dionne Brand

“They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.” What We All Long For follows the overlapping stories of a close circle of second-generation twenty-somethings living in downtown Toronto. There’s Tuyen, a lesbian avant-garde artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who’ve never recovered from losing one of their children in the crush to board a boat out of Vietnam in the 1970s. Tuyen defines herself in opposition to just about everything her family believes in and strives for. She’s in love with her best friend Carla, a biracial bicycle courier, who’s still reeling from the loss of her mother to suicide eighteen years earlier and who must now deal with her brother Jamal’s latest acts of delinquency. Oku is a jazz-loving poet who, unbeknownst to his Jamaican-born parents, has dropped out of university. He is in constant conflict with his narrow-minded and verbally abusive father and tormented by his unrequited love for Jackie, a gorgeous black woman who runs a hip clothing shop on Queen Street West and dates only white men. Like each of her friends, Jackie feels alienated from her parents, former hipsters from Nova Scotia who never made it out of subsidized housing after their lives became entangled with desire and disappointment. The four characters try to make a life for themselves in the city, supporting one another through their family struggles. There’s a fifth main character, Quy, the child who Tuyen’s parents lost in Vietnam. In his first-person narrative, Quy describes how he survived in various refugee camps, then in the Thai underworld. After years of being hardened, he has finally made his way to Toronto and will soon be reunited with his family – whether to love them or hurt them, it’s not clear. His story builds to a breathless crescendo in an ending that will both shock and satisfy readers. What We All Long For is a gripping and, at times, heart-rending story about identity, longing and loss in a cosmopolitan city. No other writer has presented such a powerful and richly textured portrait of present-day Toronto. Rinaldo Walcott writes in The Globe and Mail: “… every great city has its literary moments, and contemporary Toronto has been longing for one. We can now say with certainty that we no longer have to long for a novel that speaks this city’s uniqueness: Dionne Brand has given us exactly that.” Donna Bailey Nurse writes in the National Post: “What We All Long For is a watershed novel. From now on, Canadian writers will be pressed to portray contemporary Toronto in all its multiracial colour and polyphonic sound.” But What We All Long For is not only about a particular city. It’s about the universal experience of being human. As Walcott puts it, “Brand makes us see ourselves differently and anew. She translates our desires and experiences into a language, an art that allows us to voice that which we live, but could not utter or bring to voice until she did so for us.”

A Novel

What We All Long for

A smart, sensual and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course. This compact tour de force affirms Dionne Brand's place as one of Canada's most dazzling and influential artists. Theory begins as its narrator sets out, like many a graduate student, to write a wildly ambitious thesis on the past, present, and future of art, culture, race, gender, class, and politics--a revolutionary work that its author believes will synthesize and thereby transform the world. While our narrator tries to complete this magnum opus, three lovers enter the story, one after the other, each transforming the endeavour: first, there is beautiful and sensual Selah, who scoffs at the narrator's constant tinkering with academic abstractions; then altruistic and passionate Yara, who rescues every lost soul who crosses her path; and finally, spiritual occultist Odalys, who values magic and superstition over the heady intellectual and cultural circles the narrator aspires to inhabit. Each galvanizing love affair (representing, in turn, the heart, the head and the spirit) upends and reorients the narrator's life and, inevitably, requires an overhaul of the ever larger and more unwieldy dissertation, with results both humorous and poignant. By effortlessly telling this short, intense tale in the voice of an unnamed, ungendered (and brilliantly unreliable) narrator, Dionne Brand makes a bold statement not only about love and personhood, but about race and gender--and what can and cannot be articulated in prose when the forces that inhabit the space between words are greater than words themselves. A gorgeous, profoundly moving, word- and note-perfect novel of ideas that only a great artist at the height of her powers could write.

Theory

"A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, "A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history - the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

Notes to Belonging

A Map to the Door of No Return

On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink-blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages—the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained, the word-shard. In The Blue Clerk renowned poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet's pages. In their dialogues—which take shape as a series of haunting prose poems—the poet and the clerk invoke a host of writers, philosophers, and artists, from Jacob Lawrence, Lola Kiepja, and Walter Benjamin to John Coltrane, Josephine Turalba, and Jorge Luis Borges. Through these essay poems, Brand explores memory, language, culture, and time while intimately interrogating the act and difficulty of writing, the relationship between the poet and the world, and the link between author and art. Inviting the reader to engage with the resonant meanings of the withheld, Brand offers a profound and moving philosophy of writing and a wide-ranging analysis of the present world.

Ars Poetica in 59 Versos

The Blue Clerk

When two contemporary Caribbean women just happen to meet, an instant friendship and understanding forms as a yearning for each other's life takes them to the next stage in their own worlds.

In Another Place, Not Here

The progeny of a woman who survived a mass suicide of slaves on the island of Trinidad in 1824 spreads out across the globe, participating in 150 years of violence and struggle, two world wars, and the dangerous underworld of the Caribbean. Reprint.

At the Full and Change of the Moon

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries—tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light—in order to survive, and in order to live.

This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.

Salvage Readings from the Wreck

Poems

No Language Is Neutral

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 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; 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 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.

Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems

Guilt mingles with relief, leaving Drizzt uniquely vulnerable to the persuasions of his newest companion--Dahlia, a darkly alluring elf and the only other member of their party to survive the cataclysm at Mount Hotenow. But traveling with Dahlia is challenging in more ways than one. As the two companions seek revenge on the one responsible for leveling Neverwinter--and nearly Luskan as well--Drizzt finds his usual moral certainty swept away by her unconventional views. Forced to see the dark deeds that the common man may be driven to by circumstance, Drizzt begins to find himself on the wrong side of the law in an effort to protect those the law has failed. Making new enemies, as his old enemies acquire deadly allies, Drizzt and Dahlia quickly find themselves embroiled in battle--a state he's coming to enjoy a little too much.

Ossuaries

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history -- the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

The sharp beauty of Brand's writing draws us effortlessly into the intersecting stories of her characters caught in the middle of choices, apprehensions, fears. Each of the tales here - June's, Bedri's, Da'uud's, Lia's opens a different window on the city they all live in, mostly in parallel, but occasionally, delicately, touching and crossing one another. Each story radiates other stories. In these pages, the urban landscape cannot be untangled from the emotional one; they mingle, shift and cleave to one another.

Love Enough

Trenchant, lyrical and breathtaking in its cinematic sweep, the first UK poetry publication by the Canadian national treasure A man with his head in the clouds, an artist who has visions, is shot dead after a domestic disturbance. His partner struggles with her feelings of responsibility, and whole relationships, whole lives, the entire multicultural city of Toronto, swirl around the fatal moment. Outsiders settle in the unfamiliar landscape of a new country, uncomfortable with the place and its people, uncomfortable sometimes with themselves. Still earlier, the poet discovers herself as speaker and subject, in a joyful, imagistic, rigorous and ruthless reclamation of the poetic. 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 - and that might reach beyond the known to some other, possibly future, time and place. It is a masterwork, classic and living, and a record of one of the great writers of our age.

New and Collected Poems

Nomenclature

"The geopolitics of empire had already prepared me for this…coloniality constructs outsides and insides—worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated—in order to live something like a real self." Internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand reflects on her early reading of colonial literature and how it makes Black being inanimate. She explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes; the ways that practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression and its own consciousness.

An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading

Brand turns her clear, unflinching eye to issues of sex and sexism: male violence toward women; how Black women learn the erotic; the vulnerability of Black female life in the city; and the stereotypes of Black females in popular culture. She looks at the denial of racism by the white liberal cultural elite, the centrality of 'whiteness' in definitions of North American culture, the responses of the dominant culture to difference, and white appropriation and representations of Black culture. The history and experience of Toronto's Black community are illuminated in essays charting the differing issues and politics confronting white and Black immigrant groups, the growth of the Black consciousness movement, and the coming of age and the inner lives of a new generation of Blacks in the city. And she examines her personal history, further exploring her themes as she journeys home to Trinidad, tells of being turned down for a job, describes becoming a leftist, reviews her influences as a poet, and considers the process of filmmaking as a metaphor for the way each of us makes decisions about what we will - and will not - see.

Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, Politics

Bread Out of Stone

Unpublished City

The breathtaking debut short story collection—first published in 1989—from one of Canada's most original and influential writers. Newly available in a special reissue edition from Knopf Canada. “This is political art at its searing best.”—The Women's Review of Books Since her the appearance of her novel In Another Place, Not Here, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 1998, award-winning author Dionne Brand has become one of the most revered figures in Canadian fiction. Sans Souci is Brand’s bold fiction debut, collecting eleven stories that breathe life and language into the lives of women in the Caribbean and the Black diaspora, often dealing with the process—and aftermath—of transit and arrival. Brand’s fiction dissects sexual violence, racial prejudice, and war, while attending to the full spectrum of experiences of those who live in the shadow of a shared colonial past—experiences encompassing both joy and sorrow, release and constraint. Now available for the first time in more than a decade, Sans Souci and Other Stories is a foundational work from one of our most cherished literary artists and thinkers.

And Other Stories

Sans Souci

Canisia Lubrin

Phoebe Wang

Orient yourself in the city with these nineteen works of creative non-fiction that offer a different, more multifarious wayfinding. In this second volume of The Unpublished City, imagination is the means by which these writers find detours, shortcuts and convergences. Even as they are inventing and imagining the city, these emerging Toronto-based writers find themselves marked through tender and violent encounters. For them, the city is more than backdrop, but a witness, an accomplice and a lover.This anthology's maps of experience bring us beyond the city's limits to the cul-de-sacs and vertical dimensions of Mississauga, Vaughan, North York and Scarborough. They follow buried creeks and migratory bird corridors, they chase highs and confront colonial landmarks, they navigate waiting rooms and prop up fallen strangers. Shaped by the city, their visions also shift and plot its architectures of living in an endless symbiosisThe Unpublished City Volume II features work by Jennifer Tamanique Batler, DM St. Bernard, Lue Boileau, Angela Britto, Fathima Cader, Rachel Chen, Aylan Couchie, Nehal El-Hadi, Ryanne Kap, Emily Macrae, Téa Mutonji, E. Martin Nolan, Oubah Osman, Deepa Rajagopalan, Natasha Ramoutar, Wayne Salmon, Zoe Imani Sharpe, Leanne Toshiko Simpson and Julia Zarankin. With a foreword by Tracey Lindberg.

Dionne Brand

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