Motherlands is a lyrical meditation on the parallel journeys of motherhood and immigration—each a radical act of love, each a quiet kind of loss. In this collection of poems, the speaker navigates the shifting terrain between daughter and mother, homeland and new land, memory and body. With tenderness and grief, Motherlands explores how the severance of migration echoes the ruptures of childbirth, and how both leave behind a scarred but sacred map.
Drawing from the poet’s experience as a second-generation American, the daughter of an immigrant mother, Aunty, niece, and mother of three children, this chapbook asks: What do we lose when we cross borders—geographic, generational, or otherwise? What do we carry forward? What language do we give our children, and what silence?