SOURCE: Beauregard, Guy. “Making Bread Out of Stone.” Canadian Literature 150 (autumn 1996): 113-14.

In the following excerpt, Beauregard praises the range of cultural issues covered in Bread Out of Stone, but faults Brand's representation of Canadian reading audiences as unsophisticated.

Bread out of Stone collects thirteen essays, nine of which appear here for the first time, and provides a cohesive yet flexible context within which Brand can address a wide range of theoretical, cultural, and literary issues. The political function of writing; desire and the black woman's body; the complex intersections of racism, sexism, and homophobia; and cultural appropriation as a critical category are only a few of the concerns Brand effortlessly interweaves with her personal narratives.

Occasionally Brand misfires. In “This Body for Itself,” she condescends to explicate the relationship between “poetry” and “politics”: “I've become so used to explaining and explaining their dependency on each other to...