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.
