Andrea Brady

In​ A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), Dionne Brand makes the argument that ‘in the diaspora, as in bad dreams, you are constantly overwhelmed by the persistence of the spectre of captivity.’ For Afrodiasporic people, captivity isn’t a condition, or a place, she argues, but an embodied memory, a haunting of bodies ‘curdling under the singing of whips, those bodies...

The name​ given to Phillis Wheatley by her family is lost. She may have been born in modern-day Senegal or Gambia, and was called ‘Phillis’ after the ship in which she was forcibly transported to Boston in 1761. Wheatley was the name of the prosperous merchant family who purchased her ‘for a trifle’ – ‘a slender, frail, female child, supposed to have been...

Alice Notley​ was born in Arizona in 1945, and grew up in Needles, California. One of her first jobs was transcribing broadcasts for Radio Free Europe: the work influenced her early poems, which incorporate verbatim phrases from the street and the news – a literalisation of John Stuart Mill’s claim that poetry is eloquence overheard. Transcription was a pragmatic technique, and a...

One morning​, Hazel Brown wakes up in a hotel room in Vancouver to discover that she is the author of Baudelaire’s complete works. This is the beginning of Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal, which is billed as a novel, but reads more like a combined Bildungsroman, ars poetica and series of essays on clothing, painting, gender and reading. By appropriating...