Dionne Brand

Now in its first American edition, Dionne Brand’s groundbreaking A Map to the Door of No Return has emerged as a modern classic, a highly influential exploration of "being" in the Black diaspora.

Dionne Brand, author of the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection Ossuaries, returns with a startlingly original work about the act of writing itself. On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages—the unwritten...

An immense achievement, comprising a decades-long career—new and collected poetry from one of Canada’s most honoured and significant poets. Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, Winner Toronto Book Award, Shortlist Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand’s poetry has given rise to...

Dionne Brand’s hypnotic, urgent long poem is about the bones of fading cultures and ideas, about the living museums of spectacle where these bones are found. At the centre of Ossuaries is the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing from past actions and regrets, in a...

Tuyen is an aspiring artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who've never recovered from losing one of their children while in the rush to flee Vietnam in the 1970s. She rejects her immigrant family's hard-won lifestyle, and instead lives in a rundown apartment with friends—each of whom...

Bread Out of Stone is an original and forceful study of race, sex and politics in contemporary culture. Personal and poetic, these essays speak of matters close to the heart of a black writer. This evocative and insightful collection has been fully updated and includes four previously...

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the...

Beautiful and meticulously wrought, set in both Toronto and the Caribbean, this astonishing novel gives voice to the power of love and belonging in a story of two women, profoundly different, each in her own spiritual exile...

The breathtaking debut short story collection—first published in 1989—from one of Canada's most original and influential writers. Newly available in a special reissue edition from Knopf Canada. “This is political art at its searing best.”—The Women's Review of Books Since her the...

From our acclaimed poet and novelist: a gem of a novel that sizzles about love—between lovers, between friends, and for the places we live in—and pays homage to each moment of experience. Love lasted only one year but the time felt like several springs strung together. In...

A smart, sensual and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course. This compact tour de force affirms Dionne Brand's place as one of Canada's most dazzling and influential artists. By effortlessly telling this short, intense tale in the voice of an unnamed...

In 1824, on the island of Trinidad, Marie Ursule, queen of a secret society of militant slaves, plots a mass suicide—a quiet, passionate act of revolt. But she cannot bring herself to kill her small daughter, Bola, whom she smuggles away in the early dawn light. As Bola's children...

A New York Times Book Review's Notable Books A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year Winner of the a OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Finalist for the 2025 Zora Awards Trillium Book Prize-winning author Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the...