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#refugees

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Showing 5 of 5 results
Places You Leave

James Byrne

Places You Leave

Beginning inside the largest refugee camp in the world (Cox’s Bazar) and ending up with Lorca in Granada, Places You Leave explores questions of travel, place / displacement, self / otherness, race, feminism, national and global politics. Through poems, poetic sequences and the lyric essay, Byrne considers a ‘poethics’ of place and speaks back to the complex nature of human experience. In his most hybrid work to date, including original collages from seven different countries, Byrne advocates for activist but peaceful ways in which language might challenge existing social structures and the dynamics of power.

Places you Leave is relentlessly energetic and politically insistent without ever being pedantic, these are knife-sharp glimpses of the world. The specificity of the details – spindling out over and again – never releases us. We’re yanked along image by image, observation by observation. And, suddenly, it occurs that we’re the angel going backwards with the world collapsing in our wake.

Forrest Gander
  • Paperback £12.99 £11.69 available

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Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution

Ashur Etwebi

Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution

The poems in this collection move from memories of Libya before the revolution, to Libya engulfed in violent turmoil, to life in exile in the brooding landscape of Norway. Seen through the eyes of the refugee poet, the vibrant colours of the Libyan landscape, the horrors and ravages of revolution, and the strangeness of a new life within the Arctic Circle, come into sharp focus in this powerful book.

In Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution, Etwebi deftly
moves through time, space, argument and protest to
capture the essence of the 2011 Arab Spring along
with fragments from the poet’s past. The work brims
with astonishing technique and lyricism, holding
both the poet’s personal history and that of the
onlooking world. ‘Oh bird, from the treetop, can you
see Etwebia? / Can you smell the orange blossoms
of my dead brother?’ In this utt erly arresting image
taken from ‘Norwegian Blues’, Etwebi eff ortlessly
transcends the present, shooting his poems way
into an atmosphere without end. As tragic as it
sometimes feels, this for me is the collection’s most
remarkable achievement.


ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

Etwebi maintains his composure as a lyric poet…
insisting on distilled moments of revelation while
addressing his nation Libya’s most turbulent epochs
… [these] poems provide solace and rejuvenate,
holding on to memory and the purity of their
anguish. This is a stunning, beautiful book, one I’ve
been awaiting for a long time.

KHALED MATTAWA
  • Paperback £11.99 £10.79 available

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I am a Rohingya

ed. James Byrne and Shehzar Doja

I am a Rohingya

I Am a Rohingya implores the world to listen to the spirit of a people who have experienced some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These poems have no alternative but to speak out, they are from a crisis that must be addressed. There is brilliance in here! — John Kinsella

  • Paperback £10.99 £9.89 available

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Wolf One-Eye

Juris Kronbergs

Wolf One-Eye

Wolf One-Eye is an extraordinary cycle of poems - magical, mysterious, sinister, funny - about exile, in which the eponymous protagonist finds himself an exile from an ancient mythological landscape in a new realm of quarks and strange universes.

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Crossing Point

Myra Schneider

Crossing Point

Myra Schneider writes, "The overall theme [of this collection] is women. 'Mother and Daughter', the core sequence... recreates the life of my grandmother and the earlier life of my mother, drawing on information my mother gave me... A shorter sequence looks at the life of my mother-in-law, a refugee, and the circumstances which shaped her life.

  • Paperback £10.99 £9.89 available

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