A review by laura_sackton
Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems by Dionne Brand

I started this book in April, and read it slowly, an hour or two every weekend, for months. Then I put it aside, and read it sporadically throughout the fall. It’s brilliant. I will need to revisit it. The thing I’m mostly left with, is not just the way Brand uses language to pierce the world, or the way she is constantly interrogating what it means to use language, to be a poet, but the way all of her work is about time: how we are time beings, beings inside time, how we move through time and don’t. So much of her poetry returns to this idea in so many different ways, that we are time beings, and there is something she does with long poems, with lines, with the lack of punctuation, with verbs, with lists—she makes time in her poems. Her work is all about world-building, I think. She creates portals inside it. She is interested, I think, in how we move through time and maybe, too, the limits of time, i.e. what worlds can we build that somehow live outside of time? 

These poems are so often about living through impossible times, about the ending world, about violence and grief, and inside all of this, using poetry and language as we can, to try to make something new.

This is a teeny tiny paltry not-review of a masterwork.