
A KIND OF PERFECT SPEECH
Dionne Brand
In this powerful lecture, part memory, part library, part introspection, Dionne Brand charts her inspiring and radical journey as young poet through the struggles and transformations, both personal and political, wrought upon her world. Within these pages is an exploration of what poetry itself can accomplish:
“An act, which will precipitate other acts,
acts that change the very atmosphere.”
A Kind of Perfect Speech
Dionne Brand
$25.00
ICR, 2008
48 pages, 4 ½ x 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-896886-05-3
“Poetry revealed itself to me as a continuous sentence, which could touch the inseparableness of things, which could combine and recompose those cultural scripts into a heterogenous discourse that neither denied their conflict nor their entanglement. The realization of the long sentence—the phrase touching and escaping the phrase; the multiple register, multiple tonal, multiple lingual sentence coincided with, and was indebted to, the political ferment of the 60s and 70s.
What made me think that my poetry could add to the social and political transformations going on at the time, I don’t know. And, why poetry? Because I thought then, and still do, that poetry was/is some kind of perfect speech, some way at getting at the core of things, their true meanings; some kind of honest submission to life. Why writing at all? Because somehow I figured out that words were durable, expansive, perhaps because I had understood their effects in creating what I call in another work the ‘fictions’ of Africans in the New World. And I understood that these fictions took place regardless of the actual, the real lives lived. Perhaps even back then, as a child, as a teenager, it seemed to me compelling to rewrite these fictions.”
—Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand has degrees from University of Toronto and OISE. She teaches at University of Guelph and has been a professor at St. Lawrence University and SFU. She was the founder and editor of Our Lives, Canada’s first newspaper for black women, and worked on Fuse Magazine, The Harriet Tubman Review, Canadian Women Studies and is a poetry editor at Brick and McClelland & Stewart. Her writing has won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Prize, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Harbourfront Writers’ Prize, and the Toronto Book Award.
Read an interview with Dionne Brand in Portal 2007.
Poetry
Fore Day Morning (1978)
Earth Magic (1979)
Primitive Offensive (1982)
Winter Epigrams (1983)
Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984)
No Language Is Neutral (1990)
Land to Light On (1997)
thirsty (2002)
Inventory (2006)
Ossuaries (2010)
The Blue Clerk (2018)
Nomenclature (2022)
Brand’s non-fiction includes Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots (1986); No Burden to Carry (1991); Imagination, Representation, and Culture (1994); We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up (1994); Bread Out of Stone (1994); A Map to the Door of No Return (2001); and An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading (2020).
Her fiction includes San Souci and Other Stories (1988); In Another Place, Not Here (1996); At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999); What We All Long For (2005); Love Enough (2014); and Theory (2018).
Brand was part of the editorial team for both The Journey Prize Stories (2007) and The Unpublished City (2017) anthologies. She has also directed or been involved with the documentaries Older, Stronger, Wiser (1989); Sisters in the Struggle (1991); Long Time Comin’ (1991); Listening for Something (1996); Beyond Borders (1999); Under One Sky (1999); and Borderless (2006).
Poetry
Fore Day Morning (1978)
Earth Magic (1979)
Primitive Offensive (1982)
Winter Epigrams (1983)
Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984)
No Language Is Neutral (1990)
Land to Light On (1997)
thirsty (2002)
Inventory (2006)
Ossuaries (2010)
The Blue Clerk (2018)
Nomenclature (2022)
Brand’s non-fiction includes Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots (1986); No Burden to Carry (1991); Imagination, Representation, and Culture (1994); We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up (1994); Bread Out of Stone (1994); A Map to the Door of No Return (2001); and An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading (2020).
Her fiction includes San Souci and Other Stories (1988); In Another Place, Not Here (1996); At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999); What We All Long For (2005); Love Enough (2014); and Theory (2018).
Brand was part of the editorial team for both The Journey Prize Stories (2007) and The Unpublished City (2017) anthologies. She has also directed or been involved with the documentaries Older, Stronger, Wiser (1989); Sisters in the Struggle (1991); Long Time Comin’ (1991); Listening for Something (1996); Beyond Borders (1999); Under One Sky (1999); and Borderless (2006).




A KIND OF PERFECT SPEECH
Dionne Brand
In this powerful lecture, part memory, part library, part introspection, Dionne Brand charts her inspiring and radical journey as young poet through the struggles and transformations, both personal and political, wrought upon her world. Within these pages is an exploration of what poetry itself can accomplish:
“An act, which will precipitate other acts,
acts that change the very atmosphere.”
ICR, 2008
48 pages, 4 ½ x 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-896886-05-3
$25.00
“Poetry revealed itself to me as a continuous sentence, which could touch the inseparableness of things, which could combine and recompose those cultural scripts into a heterogenous discourse that neither denied their conflict nor their entanglement. The realization of the long sentence—the phrase touching and escaping the phrase; the multiple register, multiple tonal, multiple lingual sentence coincided with, and was indebted to, the political ferment of the 60s and 70s.
What made me think that my poetry could add to the social and political transformations going on at the time, I don’t know. And, why poetry? Because I thought then, and still do, that poetry was/is some kind of perfect speech, some way at getting at the core of things, their true meanings; some kind of honest submission to life. Why writing at all? Because somehow I figured out that words were durable, expansive, perhaps because I had understood their effects in creating what I call in another work the ‘fictions’ of Africans in the New World. And I understood that these fictions took place regardless of the actual, the real lives lived. Perhaps even back then, as a child, as a teenager, it seemed to me compelling to rewrite these fictions.”
—Dionne Brand

Tom Wayman holds an MFA from the University of California and worked as a reporter for The Vancouver Sun. He has been writer-in-residence at the universities of Windsor, Alberta, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Toronto as well as at SFU. His bibliography includes over twenty poetry collections, and he co-founded the Kootenay School of the Arts and the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union. He has been the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. He received the Acorn-Plantos Award in 2013 and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, and he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark in 2015.
Read an interview with Tom Wayman in Portal 2008.

Dionne Brand has degrees from University of Toronto and OISE. She teaches at University of Guelph and has been a professor at St. Lawrence University and SFU. She was the founder and editor of Our Lives, Canada’s first newspaper for black women, and worked on Fuse Magazine, The Harriet Tubman Review, Canadian Women Studies and is a poetry editor at Brick and McClelland & Stewart. Her writing has won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Prize, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Harbourfront Writers’ Prize, and the Toronto Book Award.
Read an interview with Dionne Brand in Portal 2007.
Poetry
Fore Day Morning (1978)
Earth Magic (1979)
Primitive Offensive (1982)
Winter Epigrams (1983)
Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984)
No Language Is Neutral (1990)
Land to Light On (1997)
thirsty (2002)
Inventory (2006)
Ossuaries (2010)
The Blue Clerk (2018)
Nomenclature (2022)
Brand’s non-fiction includes Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots (1986); No Burden to Carry (1991); Imagination, Representation, and Culture (1994); We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up (1994); Bread Out of Stone (1994); A Map to the Door of No Return (2001); and An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading (2020).
Her fiction includes San Souci and Other Stories (1988); In Another Place, Not Here (1996); At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999); What We All Long For (2005); Love Enough (2014); and Theory (2018).
Brand was part of the editorial team for both The Journey Prize Stories (2007) and The Unpublished City (2017) anthologies. She has also directed or been involved with the documentaries Older, Stronger, Wiser (1989); Sisters in the Struggle (1991); Long Time Comin’ (1991); Listening for Something (1996); Beyond Borders (1999); Under One Sky (1999); and Borderless (2006).