On a lonely wharf, a clerk in an ink-blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet’s accumulated left-hand pages — the unwritten, the withheld, the unexpressed, the withdrawn, the restrained. In The Blue Clerk, award-winning poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation/argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet’s pages. In their dialogues — which take shape as a series of prose poems — the poet and the clerk invoke a host of writers, philosophers, and artists, from Jacob Lawrence and Lola Keipja to Josephine Turalba and Jorge Luis Borges. Through these essay poems, Brand explores memory, culture, and time, offering beautiful and jarring juxtapositions and endlessly haunting language.