Acclaimed by Adrienne Rich as "fierce, sensuous ... a work of great beauty and moral imagination, " In Another Place, Not Here tells of two contemporary Caribbean women who find brief refuge in each other on an island in the midst of political uprising. Elizete, dreaming of running to another place to escape the harshness of her daily life on the island, meets Verlia, an urban woman in constant flight who has returned to her island birthplace with hopes of revolution. Their tumultuous story moves between city and island, past and future, fantasy and reality.

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 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 Collected Poems is classic and living, a record of one of the great writers of our age.

A breakout novel for Dionne Brand: a story of heart-stopping suspense from the acclaimed author of At the Full and Change of the Moon, that is also a hymn to youth and life in the city.
What we all long for opens with an unforgettable scene: desperate Vietnamese families are fleeing the country in open boats. In the confusion and darkness, six-year-old Quy, carrying his family's life-savings of diamonds sewn into his belt, loses his grip on his mother's hand and, in the crush of people, follows the wrong pair of trousered legs into another boat. His family manages to get to Canada soon after, but Quy, trapped in the refugee camps in Thailand, is seemingly lost to them.
Some twenty years on in Toronto, in the summer of 2002, Quy's mother still lives in hope of finding him. Her daughter Tuyen, an aspiring artist, and her friends are typical Canadian kids getting by in the city -- afire with their desire for independence, they're selling used clothes, bike couriering, sponging off their parents. At night they blast John Coltrane and drum 'n' bass, get high and try to find the passion they believe will galvanize their lives. Meanwhile Quy, now a dangerous criminal, is finding his way to Canada and to a gripping, unexpected encounter with his lost family.
In this beautiful novel that is both a hymn to life in the city and to youth, the mounting tension of Quy's journey is skilfully played out against the rhythms and excitements of Toronto from the seventies to the present.
Excerpt From "What We All Long For
"The muscles of highway and streets met down at the lake. All along the underpasses graffiti marred the concrete girders. She recognized the tags. The kids who livedacross the alleyway from her apartment were graffiti artists. Kumaran's grinning pig, Abel's 'narc' initial, then Keeran's desert and Jericho's lightning bolt. She felt slightly comforted though she had asked them often enough to paint something else if they were going to paint the whole city over. Something more. They had practically filled all the walls of the city with these four signs, and she would have liked them to paint a flowering jungle or a seaside, the places where her mother Angie had always dreamed of going but never went. But she loved the city. She loved riding through the neck of it. . .She loved the feeling of weight and balance it gave her.

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.

Curated by Dionne Brand, this anthology features the work of 18 emerging Toronto talents writing about their city: Diana Biacora David Bradford Nicole Chin Simone Dalton Dalton Derkson Doyali Islam Laboni Islam Ian Kamau Adnan Khan Shoilee Khan Canisia Lubrin Sofia Mostaghimi Nadia Ragbar Rudrapriya Rathore Sanchari Sur Katheryn Wabegijig Phoebe Wang Chuqiao Yang