Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101908246 ISBN 13: 9781101908242

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 2020

Synopsis

In this remarkable hardcover collection—the first of its kind—poets from around the world give eloquent voice to the trials, hopes, rewards, and losses of the experience of migration.

Each year, millions join the ranks of migrants who have reshaped societies throughout history. The movement of peoples across borders—whether forcible, as with the Middle Passage and the Trail of Tears, or voluntary, as with the great migrations from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the United States and Western Europe—brings with it emotional and psychological dislocations. More recently, African and Middle Eastern peoples have risked their lives to reach safety in Europe, while Central Americans have fled north. Whatever their circumstances, these travelers share the challenge of adapting to being strangers in a strange land.

Border Lines brings together more than a hundred poets representing more than sixty nationalities, including Mahmoud Darwish, Czeslaw Milosz, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ruth Padel, Warsan Shire, Derek Walcott, and Ocean Vuong. Their poems offer moving stories of displacement and new beginnings in such places as France, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. A monument to courage and resilience, Border Lines offers an intimate and uniquely global view of the experience of immigrants in our rapidly changing world.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

About this title

About the Author

MICHAEL WATERS is the author of numerous poetry collections, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Darling Vulgarity and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems. His honors include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and five Pushcart Prizes. Waters teaches at Monmouth University and Drew University.

MIHAELA MOSCALIUC is the author of the poetry collections Immigrant Model and Father Dirt. An associate professor at Monmouth University, she has published scholarship in the field of Romani (Gypsy) studies and is the recipient of two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Le Chateau de Lavigny, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FOREWORD

The movement of peoples from one space to another, sometimes forcibly, as with the Middle Passage and the Trail of Tears, or courageously and voluntarily, as with the great migrations from Eastern Europe, Asia, and, more recently, Africa and Latin America to the United States and Western Europe, has been accompanied by immeasurable emotional and psychological displacements. Where is home? Is it the motherland, the left-behind world of birthplace and ancestry, or is it the strange but fresh landscape of possibility and promise? Which language articulates the private self, which the public? More recently, driven by war, poverty, and multiple forms of oppression, contexts shaped significantly by First World politics and interests, African and Middle Eastern peoples have risked their lives to touch the European continent, while Central Americans have journeyed north, all intent on crossing borders – pocked and cratered terrains, guarded rivers, dangerous and indifferent seas and oceans – toward more secure lives for themselves and their children. What is the cost of such unwilling or hopeful migration? “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion,” writes the anonymous poet of Psalm 137.

Throughout the long history of these arduous journeys, poets have given voice to those who experience shifts of language and consciousness, spiritual deprivation and renewal, familial separation and reunion,and adaptation to being strangers in a strange land. André Aciman states, “Each one of us is a dislodged citizen of a country that was never really his, but that he has learned to long for and cannot forget. The fault lines of exile and diaspora always run deep, and we are always from elsewhere, and from elsewhere before that.”

It’s those aspects of elsewhere, physical and imagined, as well as the more concrete (literally andfiguratively) aspects of the here and now, that the poets in this anthology explore and engage. More than one hundred poets from a wide range of cultural backgrounds deepen into personal stories of displacement, of migration and exile, and of past language and tradition set against the dissonances and unrecognizable rituals of cultures sometimes welcoming, often fearful or antagonistic. The process of (at times reluctant) assimilation is recorded in these poems through the smallest details, through the ordinary progressions of a life – its loves and labors – which take on significance as meanings of identity, of national and global citizenship, reconstruct themselves.

“How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?” asks the anonymous poet. The poets in this anthology attempt such songs, not only of the Lord in various guises, but also of themselves and their families, their loved ones past and present, their languages and lives, all toward defining, in more encompassing terms, migration as disruptive, wondrous, challenging, desperate, ecstatic, and – not least of all – reinventive.

--Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters

Edition details

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1101908246
• ISBN 13: 9781101908242
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Moscaliuc Mihaela, Waters Michael