Mathematics of the Heart The Poetry of M. NourbeSe Philip
In Mathematics of the Heart , the poetic works of Caribbean-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip are brought together in one volume that serves as a comprehensive introduction to her poetic oeuvre. The selections, drawn from Philip’s work since 1980, radically interrogate the ways in which history and empire continue to circumscribe the space and place of the African Diaspora. Philip's work fuses aesthetic and social activism into a poetic labour that remains committed to the possibility of sociopolitical reform. Moving from the meditative lyric through to the constraints of conceptualism, her work combines experimental poetry’s interrogations of language and symbolic representation with a persistent concern for equity and justice. In her meditations on rhetorics of power, she carefully dismantles the authority of the "word," offering a sustained and alluring inquiry into language’s colonization and liberation. Philip’s enduring poetic investigations into space, place, resistance, and love make this collection timely in our contemporary moment wherein the spaces and places we occupy remain precarious and unsure. Tracing the evolution of her poetic activism over nearly 40 years, this volume is sure to appeal to scholars, students, and general readers alike.