Refugee deals with refugees of many kinds-political refugees, refugees from racism, from domestic violence, from environmental destruction and disease, specifically cancer-and their stories of cruelty and courage, hardship, and hope to overcome the most daunting of circumstances.
With tenderness, expansive compassion, and profound gifts of radiant description, Pamela Uschuk considers so many ways people may be estranged and lost in this precious, difficult world. With brave ferocity, her poems in Refugee navigate new vision and reconnection, so desperately longed for right now and always.
Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist
“There is a position in yoga called “the shining heart.” This is how Pam Uschuk has approached her poems in Refugee. Pam Uschuk is on fire. She has carried her song and vision across deserts and over mountains. Witness and beauty undivided.”
Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Fallen Angels
Pam Uschuk’s amazing new book Refugee is the affirmation of a poet at the height of her talent as a writer who has mastered the art of what poetry is about and how a poem connects us through the world. Through interwoven tightness of language, Pam Uschuk brings us imagery that is very much alive, like breathing things we used to know, or forgot, or could not live without. Here, she takes us by the hand through a world that used to be whole, but now, broken and scarred, whether that world is that of the natural world of broken creatures or people or not. Here are poems about loss, survival, and living again, the defiance to dare to feel pain, to hurt, to heal, to relive the life we were not meant to live. In a book where there are hungry children in cages, refugee mothers clinging to their children here in the new America or elsewhere, we are confronted by powerfully crafted images that take on a life of their own. Uschuk brings us the refugee, not the way we know refugees, but the way the word refugee has become transformed in this new day of anti-immigrant sentiment, that rejection a refugee knows. But in Uschuk’s Refugee, we become the metaphor of each refugee, that of the cancer patient, who is both defiant and resilient as in the ghost of the mother who chases her daughter as if alive, where we do not fear the ghost because the ghost has a metaphor of our own survival.
She writes of ghosts as if ghosts were themselves refugees seeking home. In every line, these poems are an empowerment of the survivors’ need to be woman, to be human, child refugee, mother elephant, clinging to, and nurturing its own just as a woman comforts her refugee child despite our new world of border walls and cages. In Refugee, metaphors take on new powers, where everything is woman even after the loss of womanhood, after the bruising by surgery, the pain, the discarding of parts that used to make a woman whole, the affirmation of the power of our womanness. The idea of being refugee, transcending the idea itself of being a refugee since, with Uschuk, being refugee means being all of us. Here is a book of incredible power, anger, and hope in a day when all we need is to know that we are: “Alive . . .” where we “rise/against the constant throb of absence/.” These powerfully crafted poems are urgently necessary.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, author of Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems
