Read an Excerpt from ECHO-MIRROR by Famed Dub Poet Klyde Broox

Spoken word and written poetry collide in Echo-Mirror (Wolsak & Wynn), a collection that gathers decades of work from one of Canada’s most respected dub poets. These poems carry rhythm in each line, and though they were originally meant to be heard aloud, they maintain their power in print, where legendary dub poet Klyde Broox's language cuts through cleanly.

Across the collection, questions of language, inequality, and injustice are balanced deftly with reflections on family, memory, and loss. The poems challenge the dominance of English, confront systemic racism, and celebrate Black voices with urgency and pride. There is anger here, but also care, humour, and a steady insistence on dignity.

With Echo-Mirror, Broox offers both a retrospective and a renewed call to action. A much-loved performer known for his commanding stage presence and commitment to community, Broox brings that same energy to the page, creating work that speaks to the present moment while honouring the struggles and voices that shaped the world we live in.

We've got some selected poems from this wonderful collection to share with our readers, so check them out now!

An Excerpt from Echo-Mirror by Klyde Broox

Underground Railroad Cheat Code

Oh Canada, hello, Canada 

you know, Canada, Canada

Canada, please, lend me your ears, sorry 

if any listener/reader/reviewer

is still hearing, reading or 

reviewing me like I’m a “foreigner” 

me deh ya two decades over

now long removed from being a “newcomer” 

yes, I was born in Jamaica but mi kno seh 

mi, originate in Africa and I confidently

consider myself a “person of colour”

however, if you don’t mind and could be so kind 

as to never, ever, refer to me as a “BIPOC” 

please, please, just call me “Black”

and please, kindly, humour me

write “Black,” like me, with an uppercase B

Also, with due respect, please kindly accept

my sincere apologies, I am sorry that I am not very sorry

if you’re feeling any bit of unease, please, forgive me 

but excuse me, the Underground Railroad story 

makes me feel more than a bit “uneasy”

making it about me makes me

feel sort of, er, “queasy,” you know 

well, we know, you can’t really know

but I hope that now you might be able to see how 

underground railroading might be excluding my journey 

Underground Railroad story is not my biography

please, don’t attach it to me, so literally 

when I came to Canada I was already 

free!

via Air Canada, that is how I came

proper passport, valid visa, legal ID; in my own name

Underground Railroad code, I don’t fully download

my entry mode was via a wide-open “overground railroad”

Harriet Tubman was a real-life wonder woman 

but Underground Railroad was not my journey

Canadian society stop trying to underground railroad me 

as Black as I be, when I came to Canada, I was already free

could read, write, count, calculate, ruminate and articulate properly

was already a slightly known literary entity

Harriet Tubman Institute, time to tell the whole truth 

common Canadian plantation-era narrations decorate Canada 

as a place lent, meant to serve as a “haven” from enslavement 

“North Star of Hope,” the “escape to Canada” trope

thanks for the years of philanthropy 

but they can never outweigh

those two hundred years of chattel slavery

immediate post-“emancipation” Canada

as a whites-only immigration destination, explicitly 

denying entry to free people from Africa and the Caribbean

So, welcome to Canada every refugee

it should be better here than where you used to be 

everyone is free to fight for equity in this fine country 

join the line, and since you are right behind me

after I hear about your journey

I will share my autobiography, briefly 

Underground Railroad story: no, not me

those days were too early to be in my biography 

when I came to Canada, I was already free!

My Best Friend Is White 

(for Duncan Cruickshank)

My best friend is white, and I am Black 

I am Black but my best friend is white

and racial realities bite when my white best friend 

reacts typically white to my coloured insights 

concerning matters of equal rights

And then I wonder, is my best friend 

more white than best friend

less best friend than white? 

maybe, I don’t know, I don’t know 

maybe my best friend considers me

more Black than friend, less friend than Black?

I am Black but my best friend is white 

my best friend is white, and I am Black 

no stone unturned for honesty’s sake 

more lessons learned with each mistake

great friendships may bend, but they never break 

I know my friend is not a fake

my best friend is white, and I am Black

I am Black but my best friend is white, so what? 

I am not any less Black because of that

I am Black and my best friend is white 

my best friend is white, and I am Black

but that’s all right; in my best friend’s face

I see what I know to be features of one earthborn race

Long Night’s Journey Out of Yesterday

Black Boy born and raised somewhere between being 

Invisible Man or “Most Wanted”; be quick or be dead 

long night’s journey out of yesterday

overnight clouds enshroud sunrays of today

mental chains to cast away; bright light on the journey 

Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

No pie in the sky; Blood in My Eye 

A Long Way from Home

I dream perennially

that I shall return to My Green Hills of Jamaica 

memories of island sunshine

brighten brooding Harlem shadows

No Name in the Street, Blues for Mister Charlie

“in the bigger picture,” Nobody Knows My Name

but “I Have a Dream” that guides my eyes

“Go Tell It on the Mountain,” emancipation was not liberation 

resistance must now become self-deliverance, by “Rivers of Babylon” 

even within our own motherland, mental chains to cast away

long night’s journey out of yesterday

Echo-Mirror. Copyright Klyde Broox, 2026. Excerpt printed by permission of Wolsak & Wynn.

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Outrodubtion by Susan Gingell (excerpt)

Dubpoet Klyde Brooks chose the title “outrodubtion” for the afterword to his final self-selected collection, Echo-Mirror, and this outrodubtion continues in spirit his similarly named life

celebration. He died at sixty-six on January 20, 2024, in Mississauga Hospital, near Hamilton, Ontario, his home since emigrating from Jamaica in 1993.

Clyde Broox (b. Delveland, Jamaica; June 29, 1957) became Klyde Broox in an exercise of linguistic sovereignty, but, wanting to retain whatever personal history he had written as Clyde Brooks, modified his name’s spelling while retaining its original sound.  In a biographical note on The Arty Crowd website, he had pointed to the name change as “an example of how dub updates/renews/refreshes and liberates language,” and as “a balancing of the dislocations of resettlement.” Broox’s Rastafarian name, Durm-I, marked his connections to both Africa (“Durm” is a childhood anagram for “drum”) and Rasta (In “Bongoman Was the First Dubpoet,” Broox punned using Dread Talk/Iyaric in referring to “Rasta’s far-seeing eyes [I’s].” Broox claimed that “all dubpoets have a spiritual connection to Rasta, and that “dubpoetry is steeped in . . . a ‘mystique of dreadness’” that is more than dreadlocks, which Broox wore only briefly. Dreadness is also encoded in the Rasta tam and colours he made part of his performance persona. Dubpoetry’s dreadness, Broox explained, encompasses Rasta’s spirit of “struggle, resistance, and self-liberation.” Furthermore, Rasta philosophy fundamentally grounded his belief in the power of words to inspire change, though oral peoples widely if not universally believe that words have magical potency. Voiced sounds are, after all, sonic energy, so they can make things happen.

Broox deserves to be remembered as an innovative, award-winning practitioner of dubpoetry – unlike other dubpoets, Broox wrote “dubpoetry” as one word, arguing the term is sounded without a break between “dub” and “poetry” – a reggae-derived, Black-Atlantic-translocated, political performance poetry, which he successfully brought to stage, page, video and his Facebook page. He, along with other Canadian dubbers, memorably reloaded the Canadian can(n)on by rub-a-dub styling Canadian poetry, and he uniquely reloaded the dub can(n)on by packing it with ammunition from the wired and academic worlds. Among his innovations were establishing meta-dub as a subgenre and using it to become the foremost dub theorist; creating the genre of the performance essay; and memorably coining new, politically impactful words.