Dionne Brand’s long poem Inventory (2006) is a work that “bears powerful witness to the seemingly unending wars, the ascendance of fundamentalisms, the nameless casualties that bloom out from near and distant streets” in the first years of the twenty-first century. In an activity during our engagement with the book in class, students in CULT 346/ENGL 386 Human Rights, Literature and Culture, were given 15 minutes to write a stanza that mimics the tone and style of Brand’s poem, detailing what they are witnessing and feeling in March 2026, two decades after Brand’s poem.
We daily scroll and swipe through horrific images and stories, often in isolation, but this poem presents this witnessing as a shared, collective experience. Like Brand’s speaker, we may have “nothing soothing to tell you” (100), though the poem acknowledges our connections and interdependence as beings on this planet, and hopefully inspires the resolve to foster the beauty of these relations against the structures that isolate us and pit us against one another.
Access the pdf here: POEM Continuing the Inventory (March 2026)
