News at Eleven: The poems are centred on the character of Yasmine,

an American woman who belonged to a radical leftist group in the 1970s and was involved in a bank heist, and has since lived underground. Her appraisal of the decades since, in terms of her personal experiences and the larger world, is delivered in a sequence of 15 "ossuaries," some of which she narrates, others that are in the third person.

A real ossuary contains bones, because they are the hardest material in the human body--everything else decomposes over time.

from Toronto Star: Ossuaries: Dionne Brand's new collection ponders the fragile, fragile promise of humanity

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