Migrations and Home

This anthology considers migration in its most expanded sense. The work within is heartfelt, impassioned, meditative, even mystical - and alert to the sensorium of the living world, to which migration is so central, from which we humans are not exempt.

-Meryl Pugh, author of Feral Borough (2022, Penned in the Margins) and Natural Phenomena (2018, Penned in the Margins).

"The quest is to understand myself not as a single / thing [...] but rather a constellation" Alyson Hallett writes in one of the many extraordinary poems in this anthology, which carries us from the fractures deep below the North Atlantic to the fractures in human lives; from menopause to puffins; from Brexit to Queen Anne's Lace; from the tourist who can only see flowers to the migrant boats sinking off the same shore. These are poems that challenge us to move beyond our solitary selves into the teeming, challenging, and stunning world of which we are a part. Robin Lily Goldberg writes of "breathing our selves / back into our cells" and this collection helped me do that.  

-Alexandra Teague, Professor of English (Creative Writing), Acting Chair of English, Co-Director of Creative Writing, Co-Director of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, University of Idaho

The pages of Migration and Home are haunted by tautly held oppositions: land and ocean; movement and stillness; continuity and dislocation; belonging and being a stranger. Through journeys in time and space we transform ourselves and the world around us. Experience becomes memory. The familiar becomes unfamiliar which in time becomes home, while, woven through everything, the most universal migration of all, from birth to life to death. As Victoria Field tells us "every thing is an island." And yet in these pages we find there is still power in poetry to make some sense of our disconnections.

-Marcus James, editor and publisher, Anima Poetry Press