Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen
Lillian Allen is one of the leading creative Black feminist voices in Canada. Her work has been foundational to the dub poetry movement, which swept across the Black diaspora in the 1980s, taking roots/routes in Kingston, Toronto, and London and offering exciting sounds of protest and a careful, detailed documenting of everyday life as political praxis.

Make the World New brings together some of the highlights of Lillian Allen's work in a single volume. It revisits her well-known verse from the celebrated collections Rhythm an’ Hardtimes, Women Do This Everyday, and Psychic Unrest, while also assembling new and uncollected poems. Allen's poetry is incisive in its narration of Black life and its call to create new and different futures. Her work highlights the need for radical intersectional change as a process of social transformation.

Allen’s afterword, “Tuning the Heart with Poetry,” includes the writer's reflections on her process and the social and cultural impact of the work. The introduction, by Ronald Cummings, engages with the duality of Lillian Allen's poetry in its written and spoken forms, and the give and take in committing poems to the page that “are not meant to lay still.” He also reflects on the dynamism of Allen's dub poetry, where, for example, her portrayal of breaths and breathings take on new resonance in the era of Black Lives Matter and COVID-19.

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Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen
Lillian Allen is one of the leading creative Black feminist voices in Canada. Her work has been foundational to the dub poetry movement, which swept across the Black diaspora in the 1980s, taking roots/routes in Kingston, Toronto, and London and offering exciting sounds of protest and a careful, detailed documenting of everyday life as political praxis.

Make the World New brings together some of the highlights of Lillian Allen's work in a single volume. It revisits her well-known verse from the celebrated collections Rhythm an’ Hardtimes, Women Do This Everyday, and Psychic Unrest, while also assembling new and uncollected poems. Allen's poetry is incisive in its narration of Black life and its call to create new and different futures. Her work highlights the need for radical intersectional change as a process of social transformation.

Allen’s afterword, “Tuning the Heart with Poetry,” includes the writer's reflections on her process and the social and cultural impact of the work. The introduction, by Ronald Cummings, engages with the duality of Lillian Allen's poetry in its written and spoken forms, and the give and take in committing poems to the page that “are not meant to lay still.” He also reflects on the dynamism of Allen's dub poetry, where, for example, her portrayal of breaths and breathings take on new resonance in the era of Black Lives Matter and COVID-19.

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Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen

Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen

Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen

Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen

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Overview

Lillian Allen is one of the leading creative Black feminist voices in Canada. Her work has been foundational to the dub poetry movement, which swept across the Black diaspora in the 1980s, taking roots/routes in Kingston, Toronto, and London and offering exciting sounds of protest and a careful, detailed documenting of everyday life as political praxis.

Make the World New brings together some of the highlights of Lillian Allen's work in a single volume. It revisits her well-known verse from the celebrated collections Rhythm an’ Hardtimes, Women Do This Everyday, and Psychic Unrest, while also assembling new and uncollected poems. Allen's poetry is incisive in its narration of Black life and its call to create new and different futures. Her work highlights the need for radical intersectional change as a process of social transformation.

Allen’s afterword, “Tuning the Heart with Poetry,” includes the writer's reflections on her process and the social and cultural impact of the work. The introduction, by Ronald Cummings, engages with the duality of Lillian Allen's poetry in its written and spoken forms, and the give and take in committing poems to the page that “are not meant to lay still.” He also reflects on the dynamism of Allen's dub poetry, where, for example, her portrayal of breaths and breathings take on new resonance in the era of Black Lives Matter and COVID-19.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781771124959
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date: 08/31/2021
Series: Laurier Poetry , #35
Pages: 104
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lillian Allen is one of the leading creative Black feminist voices in Canada, a two-time Juno award winning recording artist, dub poet, and professor at OCAD University. She is the author of Rhythm an’ Hardtimes, Women Do This Everyday, and Psychic Unrest. Groundbreaking albums include Conditions Critical, Revolutionary Tea Party, and Anxiety.
|Ronald Cummings is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, in Hamilton. His work focuses on Caribbean Literature and Black diaspora studies. He is co-editor (with Alison Donnell) of Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970-2020 (2021).

Table of Contents

Foreword Tanis MacDonald vii

Biographical Note ix

Introduction: Making Wor(l)ds Anew: Lillian Aliens Poetics Ronald Cummings xiii

Queenie Queenie and the Fall of Colonial Empire 1

Trust 8

JAMAICA - I Remember 10

Nellie Belly Swelly 12

My Momma 14

Marriage 16

Birth 18

To the Child 20

Broken 21

Conditions Critical 22

Nicaragua 24

Dictator (For Haiti) 25

Could it Happen in America 26

The Wait of History 27

Song for Newfoundland 28

Rasta in Court 29

With Criminal Intent 32

Unnatural Causes 34

In These Canadian Bones 37

Revolution from de Beat 38

Rub A Dub Style Inna Regent Park 40

Dark Winds 43

I Fight Back 45

Feminism 101 47

Good Womanhood (Censorship) 48

Billie Holiday 50

To a Jazz Musician (Contemplating Suicide) 51

The Poetry of Things 52

PO E 3 54

One Poem Town 55

Riddim an' Hardtimes 56

Liberation Comes 58

I Dream a Redwood 59

Liberation 60

A Poem Against Things 61

Pandemic 62

Revolutionary Tea Party 65

Dis Word 67

Afterword: Tuning the Heart With Poetry Lillian Allen 69

Acknowledgements 77

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