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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 them-dismissive, 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.

Author: Hanover, Ruth
Publication date: 25/03/2019
Imprint: Cold Hub Press
Pages: 48