The selections in Fierce Departures, drawn from Dionne Brand's work since 1997, delineate with searing eloquence how history marks and dislocates peoples of the African diaspora, how nations, concretely and conceptually, fail to create safe haven, and how human desire persists nevertheless.

Through a widening canvas, Brand unfolds the (im)possibilities of belonging for those whom history has dispossessed. Yet she also shows how Canada, and in particular Toronto, remade by those who alight on it, is a place of contingency. Known for her linguistic intensity and lyric brilliance, Brand consoles through the beauty of her work and disturbs with its uncompromising demand for ethical witness.

In her introduction, editor Leslie C. Sanders traces the evolution of Brand's poetic concerns and changing vision. In particular, she observes Brand's complex use of landscape and language to delineate the ethical and emotional issues around the desire for place. She argues that Brand reformulates Northrop Frye's question "Where is here?," disturbing and expanding the national imaginary.

As afterword, Brand has selected passages from her evocative collection of essays A Map to the Door of No Return. Read as an ars poetica, the passages summon the presences of those whose lives are circumscribed by the histories the poet narrates as her own.

Dionne Brand is internationally known for her poetry, fiction, and essays. She has received many awards, notably the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Trillium Award (Land to Light On), 1997), the Pat Lowther Award (thirsty, 2005), the City of Toronto Book Award (What We All Long For, 2006), and the Harbourfront Festival Award (2006), given in recognition of her substantial contribution to literature. She is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

Table of Contents for
Fierce Departures: The Poetry of Dionne Brand, selected with an introduction by Leslie C. Sanders

Foreword | Neil Besner

Biographical Note

Introduction | Leslie C. Sanders

No Language Is Neutral

No language is neutral

There it was anyway, some damn memory half-eaten

Pilate was that river I never crossed as a child

I walk Bathurst Street until it come like home

But wait, this must come out then

In another place, not here, a woman might touch

Land to Light On

V

V

V

iv

V

V

thirsty

III

XII

XIII

XV

XVII

XVIII

XXX

Inventory III

One year she sat at the television weeping

nothing personal is recorded here

what confidences would she tell you then

she's heard clearly now, twenty-three

beating on the tympanic bone, by suicide bomb

At least someone should stay awake, she thinks

and bones beatific, sharpened with heat, at least

"It is worst during the night

there's another life, she listens, each hour, each night

If they're numb over there, and all around her

she'll gather the passions of women

till then / where are the packages of black pepper

she is a woman who is losing the idea

Afterword | Dionne Brand

Acknowledgements