Blank by M Nourbese Philip

Blank by M Nourbese Philip

Bla_Kis a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important writers and thinkers.

Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone unseen by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire and at the frontier of silence.

In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, Bla_Kexplores questions of timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, race, the body politic, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence.

“The essays in Bla_K show not just how prescient Philip is as a commentator, but how much our culture has lost by the marginalization and erasure of voices like hers (hence the book’s title)” —Quill & Quire

“Bla_K is an essential remedy.” —The Globe and Mail

“M. NourbeSe’s career-spanning book, Bla_K, taught me so much, not least of which is how little I know about the history of Black writers and writing in Canada.”—All Lit Up 

M.NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, writer, and playwright who was born in Tobago and now lives in Toronto, in the twin island state of Trinidad and Tobago. She is the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Zong! EVIE SHOCKLEY is a Rutgers University associate professor of English and the author of the new black, which won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Prize in Poetry in 2012.