SOURCE: Gingell, Susan. “Still Need the Revolution.” Canadian Literature 161-62 (summer-autumn 1999): 182-84.

In the following essay, Gingell reviews Land to Light On, maintaining that the power of the first-person narration in these poems makes it difficult for the reader to distinguish between author and narrator.

For some years now I've been overhearing Brand as she talked in her poetry, fiction, and essays first and foremost to those in the Black diaspora. This writing has consistently given me a sharper sense of the various terrains on which she struggles: racism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, classism, sexism, heterosexism. It has also consistently given me political energy for those struggles, given me pleasure too. With Land to Light On, however, so powerful a first-person persona does she create, with such obvious grounding in some of the details of her life-story, that I was constantly working not to read the work as autobiographical and...