Bla_K is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important writers and thinkers.
Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone unseen by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire and at the frontier of silence.
In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, Bla_K explores questions of timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, race, the body politic, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence.

M. NourbeSe Philip is the author of the play Coups and Calypsos, two novels, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, and Harriet’s Daughter (Heinemann; The Women’s Press); three non-fiction works, Frontiers, Showing Grit, and A Genealogy of Resistance; and three books of poetry, including She Tries Her Tongue and Her Silence Softly Breaks, winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize. She is a Fellow in Poetry of the Guggenheim Foundation, and recipient of the Toronto Arts Award for Literature.

M. NourbeSe Philip's profile page

“M. NourbeSe’s career-spanning book, Bla_K, taught me so much, not least of which is how little I know about the history of Black writers and writing in Canada.”—All Lit Up

“Bla_K is an essential remedy.” —The Globe and Mail