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thirsty
This is a poem about the city. About a man who has visions, hovering on the edge but hating it, restless and at war with the world but wanting the peace that passeth understanding. Everything he does is half-done, except his death. When he falls, his parched spirit crying "thirsty," his family falls apart. This is a poem about Toronto, the city that’s never happened before, about waiting for a bus, standing on a corner, watching a stranger: the bank to one corner, the driving school on another, the milk store and the church. This is also about the poet, her own restless sensibility woven in and out through moments of lyric beauty, dramatic power and storytelling grace. It is written in the margins, like a medieval manuscript with shades of light and darkness.
72 pages, Paperback
First published April 16, 2002
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223 people want to read
About the author
Dionne Brand
61 books487 followersAs a young girl growing up in Trinidad, Dionne Brand submitted poems to the newspapers under the pseudonym Xavier Simone, an homage to Nina Simone, whom she would listen to late at night on the radio. Brand moved to Canada when she was 17 to attend the University of Toronto, where she earned a degree in Philosophy and English, a Masters in the Philosophy of Education and pursued PhD studies in Women’s History but left the program to make time for creative writing.
Dionne Brand first came to prominence in Canada as a poet. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award and thirsty, finalist for the Griffin Prize and winner of the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Brand is also the author of the acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, which was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and At the Full and Change of the Moon. Her works of non-fiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return.
What We All Long For was published to great critical acclaim in 2005. While writing the novel, Brand would find herself gazing out the window of a restaurant in the very Toronto neighbourhood occupied by her characters. “I’d be looking through the window and I’d think this is like the frame of the book, the frame of reality: ‘There they are: a young Asian woman passing by with a young black woman passing by, with a young Italian man passing by,” she says in an interview with The Toronto Star. A recent Vanity Fair article quotes her as saying “I’ve ‘read’ New York and London and Paris. And I thought this city needs to be written like that, too.”
In addition to her literary accomplishments, Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.
For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/dionne-b...
Dionne Brand first came to prominence in Canada as a poet. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award and thirsty, finalist for the Griffin Prize and winner of the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Brand is also the author of the acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, which was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and At the Full and Change of the Moon. Her works of non-fiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return.
What We All Long For was published to great critical acclaim in 2005. While writing the novel, Brand would find herself gazing out the window of a restaurant in the very Toronto neighbourhood occupied by her characters. “I’d be looking through the window and I’d think this is like the frame of the book, the frame of reality: ‘There they are: a young Asian woman passing by with a young black woman passing by, with a young Italian man passing by,” she says in an interview with The Toronto Star. A recent Vanity Fair article quotes her as saying “I’ve ‘read’ New York and London and Paris. And I thought this city needs to be written like that, too.”
In addition to her literary accomplishments, Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.
For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/dionne-b...
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
September 3, 2025
Dionne Brand is so good at words. The best, even.
March 11, 2021
Read for class.
Though it was hard to keep up with the longer narrative that is divided into the numbered poems of this collection, I found it to be such a beautiful book. Covers racial injustice in such an intimate way, and creates a city that is vibrant, unforgiving and beautiful. Totally alive.
Though it was hard to keep up with the longer narrative that is divided into the numbered poems of this collection, I found it to be such a beautiful book. Covers racial injustice in such an intimate way, and creates a city that is vibrant, unforgiving and beautiful. Totally alive.
April 13, 2011
...would I have lived a different life
failing this embrace with broken things
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain, would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates a breath...
Just one of the many "wow" moments for me in this book.
I loved the surrealism; the seemingly incongruent words and concepts pulled together in harmony; the meandering feel; the prose-like quality that nonetheless carries a beautiful music - I didn't know people could write like that.
failing this embrace with broken things
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain, would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates a breath...
Just one of the many "wow" moments for me in this book.
I loved the surrealism; the seemingly incongruent words and concepts pulled together in harmony; the meandering feel; the prose-like quality that nonetheless carries a beautiful music - I didn't know people could write like that.
February 27, 2008
I abhor best of lists and all those lists that try to define what equals the most important thing you have ever read/heard/tasted.
However, I would take this book with me if I was quickly escaping the city. I could flip to almost any page and find a line or a phrase that makes me pause. That is perhaps the best I can ask of any book.
However, I would take this book with me if I was quickly escaping the city. I could flip to almost any page and find a line or a phrase that makes me pause. That is perhaps the best I can ask of any book.
January 18, 2022
This city is beauty
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,
submerged landings,
I am innocent as thresholds
and smashed night birds, lovesick,
as empty elevators
let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held
the touch of everything blushes me,
pigeons and wrecked boys,
half-dead hours, blind musicians,
inconclusive women in bruised dresses
even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible
briefcases, how come, how come
I anticipated nothing as intimate as history
would I have had a different life
failing this embrace with broken things,
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain, would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates a breath
and this, we meet in careless intervals,
in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic
conversations, lotteries, untranslatable
mouths, in versions of what we may be,
a tremor of the hand in the realization
of endings, a glancing blow of tears
on skin, the keen dismissal in speed
* * *
now the door faces nothing, the window faces nothing
a parking lot, a toxic shed where movies
are made, a bus stop where pigeons light
between the morning crowd and the afternoon
itinerant baby and girl-mother,
they've laid a quick over green sod down
back of this urban barracoon, hoping
to affect beauty, no books this time, no
dictionaries to hang on to, just me and the city
that's never happened before, and happened
though not even like this, the garbage
of pizza boxes, dead couches,
the strip mall of ambitious immigrants
under carcasses of cars, oil-soaked
clothing, hulks of rusted trucks, scraggily
gardens of beans, inshallahs under the breath,
querido, blood fire, striving stilettoed rudbeckia
breathing, you can breathe if you find air,
this rolling, this weight of bodies,
as if we need each other to breathe, to bring
it into sense, and well, in that we are merciless
* * *
Her hand leafs through the grained air
of the room gleaning strands of his breath
and something to be put back together
and his mother's tuning wail and the dark
blue of the policemen's uniforms,
it touches shoes and the stairway
and a going bliss, the polish
of a dimming effort and a hint of
scarlet bergamot, in... here take them
Alan is in cinders on the floor,
she herself is smoldering with her
own incandescence, her reach for what
she must keep ad the child to steady her
* * *
I'll tell you what I've seen here at Yonge and Bloor,
At this crossroad, the air is elegiac with it
whiffs and cirri of all emotion, need and vanity,
desire, brazen as a killing
a burger a leather jacket a pair of shoes a smoke
to find a job to get drunk at the Zanzibar,
a body the body of a woman in a cage on the window
in a photograph in a strip joint two blocks away.
to piss to get drunk to get fucked to get high
grease sushi men wanting to be beaten to be touched
and all the anonymous things that may happen
on a corner like this for instance murder
If you look into any face here you might fall
into its particular need. And a woman I've seen her
Julia perhaps walks here I can't quite make her out
She is a mixture of twigs and ink she's like paper
* * *
Anyone, anyone can find themselves on a street corner
eclipsed, as they, by what deserted them
volumes of blue skirt with lace eyelets
a dance stroke you might have trimmed
the way a day can slip out of your hand,
your senses spill like water,
the tremolos of Leroy Jenkins' violin exiting
the Horseshoe Tavern, the accumulation of tender
seconds you should have noticed, as mercy,
even these confessions of failure so unreliable,
hardly matter
* * *
Every smell is now a possibility, a young man
passes wreathed in cologne, that is hope;
teenagers, traceries of marijuana, that is hope too, utopia;
smog braids the city where sweet grass used to,
yesterday morning's exhaust, this day's
breathing by the lightness, the heaviness of the soul.
Every night the waste of the city is put out and taken away
to suburban landfills and recycling plants,
and that is the rhythm everyone would prefer in their life,
that the waste is taken out, that what may be useful
be saved and the rest, most of it, the ill of it,
buried.
Sometimes the city's stink is fragrant offal,
sometimes it is putrid. All depends on what wakes you up,
the angular distance of death or the elliptic of living.
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,
submerged landings,
I am innocent as thresholds
and smashed night birds, lovesick,
as empty elevators
let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held
the touch of everything blushes me,
pigeons and wrecked boys,
half-dead hours, blind musicians,
inconclusive women in bruised dresses
even the habitual grey-suited men with terrible
briefcases, how come, how come
I anticipated nothing as intimate as history
would I have had a different life
failing this embrace with broken things,
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain, would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates a breath
and this, we meet in careless intervals,
in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic
conversations, lotteries, untranslatable
mouths, in versions of what we may be,
a tremor of the hand in the realization
of endings, a glancing blow of tears
on skin, the keen dismissal in speed
- I, pg. 1-
* * *
now the door faces nothing, the window faces nothing
a parking lot, a toxic shed where movies
are made, a bus stop where pigeons light
between the morning crowd and the afternoon
itinerant baby and girl-mother,
they've laid a quick over green sod down
back of this urban barracoon, hoping
to affect beauty, no books this time, no
dictionaries to hang on to, just me and the city
that's never happened before, and happened
though not even like this, the garbage
of pizza boxes, dead couches,
the strip mall of ambitious immigrants
under carcasses of cars, oil-soaked
clothing, hulks of rusted trucks, scraggily
gardens of beans, inshallahs under the breath,
querido, blood fire, striving stilettoed rudbeckia
breathing, you can breathe if you find air,
this rolling, this weight of bodies,
as if we need each other to breathe, to bring
it into sense, and well, in that we are merciless
- VIII, pg. 11
* * *
Her hand leafs through the grained air
of the room gleaning strands of his breath
and something to be put back together
and his mother's tuning wail and the dark
blue of the policemen's uniforms,
it touches shoes and the stairway
and a going bliss, the polish
of a dimming effort and a hint of
scarlet bergamot, in... here take them
Alan is in cinders on the floor,
she herself is smoldering with her
own incandescence, her reach for what
she must keep ad the child to steady her
- XIV, pg. 23
* * *
I'll tell you what I've seen here at Yonge and Bloor,
At this crossroad, the air is elegiac with it
whiffs and cirri of all emotion, need and vanity,
desire, brazen as a killing
a burger a leather jacket a pair of shoes a smoke
to find a job to get drunk at the Zanzibar,
a body the body of a woman in a cage on the window
in a photograph in a strip joint two blocks away.
to piss to get drunk to get fucked to get high
grease sushi men wanting to be beaten to be touched
and all the anonymous things that may happen
on a corner like this for instance murder
If you look into any face here you might fall
into its particular need. And a woman I've seen her
Julia perhaps walks here I can't quite make her out
She is a mixture of twigs and ink she's like paper
- XXIII, pg. 42
* * *
Anyone, anyone can find themselves on a street corner
eclipsed, as they, by what deserted them
volumes of blue skirt with lace eyelets
a dance stroke you might have trimmed
the way a day can slip out of your hand,
your senses spill like water,
the tremolos of Leroy Jenkins' violin exiting
the Horseshoe Tavern, the accumulation of tender
seconds you should have noticed, as mercy,
even these confessions of failure so unreliable,
hardly matter
- XXVIII, pg. 52
* * *
Every smell is now a possibility, a young man
passes wreathed in cologne, that is hope;
teenagers, traceries of marijuana, that is hope too, utopia;
smog braids the city where sweet grass used to,
yesterday morning's exhaust, this day's
breathing by the lightness, the heaviness of the soul.
Every night the waste of the city is put out and taken away
to suburban landfills and recycling plants,
and that is the rhythm everyone would prefer in their life,
that the waste is taken out, that what may be useful
be saved and the rest, most of it, the ill of it,
buried.
Sometimes the city's stink is fragrant offal,
sometimes it is putrid. All depends on what wakes you up,
the angular distance of death or the elliptic of living.
- XXXII, pg. 62
November 5, 2020
Had to read this for english class. I didn't like the last Dionne Brand book I had to read for class, but the reviews on this one seemed promising so I tried going in without any expectations. But I didn't understand anything that was going on. It just felt like reading words that had no meaning put together in sentences. I've read and enjoyed poetry before, so I didn't not like the book because of its format, I just simply found myself lost in what Brand was even writing about.
December 31, 2019
One of the books that was waiting for me on these Nairobi streets. A poem about a city (Toronto) written in Brand's exquisite style. From the first line ("this city is beauty) to the last, we move from outer to inner landscapes, the desire for somewhere else, a new life. Reading, we are perched on a high point in the city watching the parched man fall as he says, "thirsty..."
May 5, 2019
It took me around three reads to start to understand thirsty and if I hadn't had to read it as part of a course, I probably wouldn't have gone past that first read. But understanding it became an experience and made me enjoy it, although poetry is not my groove.
August 22, 2022
This was one long narrative with numbered poems like chapters.
December 24, 2024
☆3.5 // soort poëtische liefdesbaby van Baldwin's Another Country & Morrison's Jazz
p. 7: "where was the light she was keeping from his hands"
p. 7: "where was the light she was keeping from his hands"
January 24, 2025
I didn't understand it the first time because her poetry style is a bit hard to follow, but after a close reading of it, Brand is so talented and thorough.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 13, 2010
I'm not really sure how to do this review -- this is the first book of contemporary poetry I've read, as far as I can remember, and there isn't much to compare it too. Thirsty is a long poem about an instance of police brutality which expands out into reflections on modern urbanity, focused on Brand's city (and mine, sort of) of Toronto. (I think, at last. The "plot" isn't that easy to follow.) Brand's language is beautiful, and that's all you can ask of poetry, but she also brilliantly captures the complexity of racial politics and our reaction to tragedy, as both indiviuals and as a society. I was not disappointed by this book, and would reccomend it to anyone looking to get into poetry.
November 4, 2009
I really enjoyed this book of poetry. I don't normally enjoy poetry but this I found to be quite interesting. I like the ways in which she uses words to help describe things to the point where they almost jump off the page. She has a way with words that's for sure. I liked how she kept using the word thirsty to draw everything back together. If you don't like poetry you'll probably enjoy this book.
February 27, 2009
I found the book arresting and fascinating. Dionne Brand has a way of bringing words together that instantly shift my understanding of the world. I like how this book circled around the death of a man, the way the impact of that event rippled through his family and out into the larger city. It would be a nice choice for a course on portrayals of the urban landscape.
May 14, 2012
Dionne Brand is one of the foremost poets of our time and this piece is a poignant exploration of humanity and oppression through the lens of police brutality.
Want to read
August 3, 2012Became distracted by Left to Tell...will pick this up later.
July 12, 2016
orthodox easter in muskoka
February 4, 2017
I enjoyed that there was a narrative that connected the majority of these poems. There were moments of absolute beauty, lines that made me pause and ponder.
May 31, 2025
Read this for contemporary Lit class. Was heartbreaking. 4/5 ⭐️
January 25, 2013
3.5 Stars.
***Read For School***
***Read For School***
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews