Brand turns her clear, unflinching eye to issues of sex and sexism: male violence toward women; how Black women learn the erotic; the vulnerability of Black female life in the city; and the stereotypes of Black females in popular culture. She looks at the denial of racism by the white liberal cultural elite, the centrality of 'whiteness' in definitions of North American culture, the responses of the dominant culture
Brand explores themes of gender, race, sexuality and feminism, white male domination, injustices and "the moral hypocrisies of Canada"
She has contributed to many anthologies opposing the violent killings of Black men and women, the massacre of fourteen women in Montreal and racism and inequality as experienced by Aboriginal women of Canada, particularly Helen Betty Osborne's death in the Pas.
In his book Black Like Who?, Rinaldo Walcott includes two essays ("A Tough Geography": Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada and "No Language is Neutral": The Politics of Performativity in M. Nourbese Philip's and Dionne Brand's Poetry) on Brand's poetry and the principal themes of her work. (Brand herself had previously used a line from Derek Walcott to title her collection No Language is Neutral, in which she "uses language to disturb" in poetry containing biographic meaning ancestral references.) Brand believes that "by addressing real power can we begin to deal