Inventory

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.“Inventory is damning without being superior, sorrowful without falling into self-pity, joyful without becoming naive. . . . Thought-provoking. . . .What makes Inventory even more powerful, and hard to put down, is Brand’s willingness to match the strength of these desolate lists with a strength of music, dream and intimate feeling.” —Globe and Mail

“You don’t read Dionne Brand, you hear her.” —Toronto LifeDIONNE BRAND's literary credentials are legion. Her novel Theory was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Her poetry collection The Blue Clerk was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Prize. Her collection Ossuaries won the Griffin Poetry Prize, and other collections have won the Governor General's Literary Award, the Trillium Book Prize, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Among her other novels, In Another Place, Not Here was selected as a NYT Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book by the Globe and Mail; At the Full and Change of the Moon was selected as a Best Book by the LA Times; and What We All Long For won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, Brand was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the world of books and writing; from 2009 to 2012 she served as Toronto's Poet Laureate, and in 2020 she won the internationally prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. In 2017, she was named to the Order of Canada. And in 2022, she became Editorial Director of Alchemy, a line of books within Knopf Canada. She lives in Toronto.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 genealogyPoems