Salvage by Dionne Brand

Salvage by Dionne Brand

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024. Winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Finalist for the 2025 Zora Awards.

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand's first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries--tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light--in order to survive, and in order to live.

This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.

DIONNE BRAND's literary credentials are legion. Her most recent book of poetry is Ossuaries, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize; her 9 others include winners of the Governor General's Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her novel In Another Place, Not Here was Selected as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year and a Best Book by the Globe and Mail; At the Full and Change of the Moon was also selected a Best Book by the LA Times. The Globe and Mail called it in many respects nothing short of brilliant--her storytelling, coupled with her vision and spectacular gifts as a poet, make it one of the essential works of our times. Her novel What We All Long For was published to great acclaim in Canada, Italy and Germany and won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, Brand was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the world of books and writing, and was Toronto's Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2012. Brand is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781250397720
ISBN 10	1250397723
Title	Salvage
Author	Dionne Brand
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	St Martin's Press
Year published	2026-01-27
Number of pages	224
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.