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In Dionne Brand's incantatory, deeply engaged, beautifully crafted long poem, the question is asked, What would an inventory of the tumultuous early years of this new century have to account for? Alert to the upheavals that mark those years, Brand bears powerful witness to the seemingly unending wars, the ascendance of fundamentalisms, the nameless casualties that bloom out from near and distant streets. An inventory in form and substance, Brand's poem reckons with the revolutionary songs left to fragment, the postmodern cities drowned and blistering, the devastation flickering across TV screens grown rhythmic and predictable. Inventory is an urgent and burning lamentation
"You don't read Dionne Brand, you hear her."
- Toronto Life Dionne Brand is a poet and novelist living in Toronto. Her nine volumes of poetry include Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Book Award in 1997; thirsty, winner of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize; and, most recently, Inventory, a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Dionne Brand's most recent novel, What We All Long For, was published to great acclaim in Canada and Italy in 2005, and won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, she was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize. II
Observed over Miami, the city, an orange slick blister,
the houses, stiff-haired organisms clamped to the earth,
engorged with oil and wheat,
rubber and metals,
the total contents of the brain, the electrical
regions of the atmosphere, water
coming north, reeling, a neurosis of hinged
clouds,
bodies thicken, flesh
out in immodest health,
six boys, fast food on their breath,
luscious paper bags, the perfume of grilled offal,
troughlike cartons of cola,
a gorgon luxury of electronics, backward caps,
bulbous clothing, easy hearts
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
lines of visitors are fingerprinted,
eye-scanned, grow murderous,
then there's the business of thoughts
who can glean with any certainty,
the guards, blued and leathered, multiply
to stop them,
palimpsests of old borders, the sea's graph on the skin,
the dead giveaway of tongues,
soon, soon, the implants to discern lies
from the way a body moves
there's that already
she felt ill, wanted
to murder the six boys, the guards,
the dreamless shipwrecked
burning their beautiful eyes in the patient queue
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Let's go to the republic of home,
let's forget all this then, this victorious procession,
these blenching queues,
this timeless march of nails in shoeless feet
what people will take and give,
the passive lines, the passive guards,
if passivity can be inchoate self-loathing
all around, and creeping
self-righteous, let's say it, fascism,
how else to say, border,
and the militant consumption of everything,
the encampment of the airport, the eagerness
to be all the same, to mince biographies
to some exact phrases, some
exact and toxic genealogy
"You don't read Dionne Brand, you hear her."
- Toronto Life Dionne Brand is a poet and novelist living in Toronto. Her nine volumes of poetry include Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Book Award in 1997; thirsty, winner of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize; and, most recently, Inventory, a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Dionne Brand's most recent novel, What We All Long For, was published to great acclaim in Canada and Italy in 2005, and won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, she was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize. II
Observed over Miami, the city, an orange slick blister,
the houses, stiff-haired organisms clamped to the earth,
engorged with oil and wheat,
rubber and metals,
the total contents of the brain, the electrical
regions of the atmosphere, water
coming north, reeling, a neurosis of hinged
clouds,
bodies thicken, flesh
out in immodest health,
six boys, fast food on their breath,
luscious paper bags, the perfume of grilled offal,
troughlike cartons of cola,
a gorgon luxury of electronics, backward caps,
bulbous clothing, easy hearts
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
lines of visitors are fingerprinted,
eye-scanned, grow murderous,
then there's the business of thoughts
who can glean with any certainty,
the guards, blued and leathered, multiply
to stop them,
palimpsests of old borders, the sea's graph on the skin,
the dead giveaway of tongues,
soon, soon, the implants to discern lies
from the way a body moves
there's that already
she felt ill, wanted
to murder the six boys, the guards,
the dreamless shipwrecked
burning their beautiful eyes in the patient queue
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Let's go to the republic of home,
let's forget all this then, this victorious procession,
these blenching queues,
this timeless march of nails in shoeless feet
what people will take and give,
the passive lines, the passive guards,
if passivity can be inchoate self-loathing
all around, and creeping
self-righteous, let's say it, fascism,
how else to say, border,
and the militant consumption of everything,
the encampment of the airport, the eagerness
to be all the same, to mince biographies
to some exact phrases, some
exact and toxic genealogy