Titled after the Latin term for “unknown land”—a cartographical expression referring to regions that have not yet been mapped or documented—Terra Incognita is a collection of poems that creatively explores various racial discourses and interracial crossings both buried in the grand narratives of history and the everyday experiences of being mixed-race. The poet asks how the discourse of multiculturalism speaks to the particular history of interracial figures—a history that has remained largely silenced, and a people who have continued to experience inequity on various fronts. In this collection, the quest for identity in the interracial sense becomes part of the quest to unearth the territory of those who cross borders—racially, ethnically, culturally and geographically. Terra Incognita looks forward to the possibility of new poetic conventions and metaphoric structures to re-imagine the face of Canada’s so-called multicultural milieu, and map the similar “psychic” spaces shared by different geographies (America and Canada, for example) and demographies (mixed-race populations). Poems seek to engage the cultural memory and legacy of those whose histories have been the site of erasure, and who have thus—riffing on the Heraclitus’s dictum that “geography is fate”—been forced to redraw themselves into the texts of history. An important contribution to the history of Afro-Canadian and Afro-American arts and letters, Terra Incognita is at the frontlines of exploring what it means to be mixed-race in the world—within the nexus of both celebrations of diversity and the overcoming of oppressive structures using the creative medium.

Adebe DeRango-Adem is a writer and former attendee of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University), where she mentored with poets Anne Waldman and Amiri Baraka. She is the author of three previous full-length poetry books to date: Ex Nihilo, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Terra Incognita, nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award; and The Unmooring. A poem from The Unmooring was featured in the 2019 Poem-In-Your-Pocket anthology, co-created by the League of Canadian Poets and the Academy of American Poets. Adebe served as the 2019-20 Barbara Smith Writer-in-Residence with Twelve Literary Arts (Cleveland, Ohio) and was selected by Sonia Sanchez as the winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest. She lives in Toronto.

Adebe DeRango-Adem's profile page