A joyful, imagistic discovery of woman as speaker and subject. As a woman, a black, and a lesbian, Brand arrives at a rigorous and nakedly ruthless reclamation of the poetic.

Dionne Brand is internationally known for her poetry, fiction, and essays. She has received many awards, notably the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Award (Land to Light On), 1997), the Pat Lowther Award (Thirsty, 2005), the City of Toronto Book Award (What We All Long For, 2006), and the Harbourfront Festival Award (2006), given in recognition of her substantial contribution to literature. She is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

Leslie C. Sanders is a professor at York University, where she teaches African American and Black Canadian literature. She is the author of The Development of Black Theatre in America, the editor of two volumes of Langston Hughes’s performance works, and a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes. She has written essays on African American and Black Canadian literature.

Dionne Brand's profile page

• Winner, Harbourfront Festival Prize

“With her amazing gaze and extraordinary skill, Dionne Brand has once again given us a collection of poetry both complex and unerring in its vision, integrity, sense of history. Brand understands the vivacity of the past, the strength of ancestral voices, and integrates these in a poetry astonishing in its ability to sing to us, to move us, to make us remember. A major work by a brilliant poet.” —Michelle Cliff

“Dionne Brand’s voice is unique, elegiac . . . she uses language to disturb. As water in a pool is, by a stone’s throw, disturbed, distorted. English unleased.” —Dorothy Livesay

“No Language Is Neutral is a gathering of thoughtful meaning and of strong beautiful images which cannot leave anyone neutral” —Nicole Brossard