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This chapbook of seventeen profoundly empathetic poems by Christchurch poet Ruth Hanover is a timely meditation on displacement, and survival dedicated to seekers of asylum and those who reach towards them.

A mother and child inhabit the psychological space between the mainland and Nauru. A young man enters his own culture through the close reading of another. The Levant is apparent in Paris, generations late. A re-formed underground functions where passports can not, and the trains leave, from Austerlitz.

These poems follow refugees, seekers of asylum, and the response to themdismissive, violent, or expressed in the smallest act of magnanimity. The power to choose and the practice of choice runs throughout. It remains to be seen if we might yet follow Aristotle and cultivate humanity or get to the end, witness to a state of disgrace.

Featured in the 6 May 2019 New Zealand newsletter.
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