Magnitude - by Deborah Seddon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Working with a rich, explicit and often musical intertextuality, this collection examines the challenges of both diaspora and displacement. The experience of a mother's illness and death, and the packing-up of a family home in Harare, become the impetus to explore childhood memories and the adult child's self-reckoning, raising questions of the earthly and the spiritual, the human and the animal, and the existential unhousing and self-homing of queerness. The poetry makes connections of magnitude beyond the immediate subject of one particular Zimbabwean family and its place in a complex familial and national history, interrogating wider issues of home and belonging, and particularly the experience of migrants who have fled unliveable homes only to be refused human kinship in their host countries.