To Gather Your Leaving: Asian Diaspora Poetry
Boey Kim Cheng, Arin Alicia Fron and Justin Chia (Editors)
Ethos Books: 2019
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Poetry anthologies, as often as not, are platforms for a polemic, staking a claim for a ‘movement’, conferring a status on shifts in the genre. They are a principal vehicle for literary taxonomies and histories, are mobilised as weapons in the struggle. To Gather Your Leaving is one such map for a poetic territory.
The poems collected here are the documents of border crossings: from the nations and cultures from which the writers are exiled—exiles themselves or the descendants of exiles, émigrés or refugees—and then to the cultures where their writing seeks its readership. At the core of this cultural intersection are the lines of Debjani Chatterjee:
Indifferent language of an alien shore,
the journey was troubled but I am here:
register me among your step-children …
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