Dionne Brand powerfully delves into uncharted aspects of urban life, the bittersweetness of youth, and secrets families try to hide. 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 is grappling with their own familial complexities and heartache.

In turns thrilling and heartbreaking, Tuyen's lost brother--who has since become a criminal in...

Despite the increasing scope and authority of women's studies, the role of Black women in Canada's history has remained largely unwritten and unacknowledged. This silence supports the common belief that Black people have only recently arrived in Canada and that racism is also a fairly recent development. This book sets the record straight.

The six essays collected here explore three hundred years of Black women in Canada, from the seventeenth century to the immediate post-Second World War period. Sylvia Hamilton documents the experiences of Black women in Nova Scotia, from early...

One of Canada's most distinguished poets, Dionne Brand explores and chronicles how history shapes human existence, in particular the lives of those ruptured and scattered by New World slaveries and modern crises. This republication of three early volumes presents a view of the trajectory of her poetic journey. Read retrospectively, the earlier work is haunting, a testament to a historical moment in which change seemed possible, even imminent, a belief nourished by the various social movements that galvanized a generation. Individually and as a whole, Brand's work charts a collective as...