Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Usha Kishore's third poetry collection, IMMIGRANT, is gleaned from nearly two decades of writing. This book examines the political, cultural and linguistic spaces of first-generation South Asian immigrants to the UK, and illustrates that to live in the diaspora is to occupy a spectral space, to be haunted by the ghosts of history, empire and colonialism, to be a ghost flitting in and out of spaces called nations, to be homeless, to be caught between. The binary perspectives of assimilation and marginalization recur in these poems as Kishore documents the politics of being an immigrant professional interacting with the harsh realities of racism and discrimination as she draws from her experience as an English teacher and tries to chart her poetic space in an imagined borderland. Richly experiential and languishing in language, these are poems that speak to our quest for home.
