"The poems howl, perspire, fall in love, reimagine myth, lose language, find language, have faith in poetry, disbelieve in poetry, repurpose the brutal language of ICE spreadsheets, turn to consider the border, turn away and consider everything but the border—and in this way, are among the best poems ever written. They will shake you to your core."
—INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS, author of the Pulitzer-Prize finalist The Man Who Could Move Clouds
Forthcoming September 2024. Now available for pre-order.
Advanced Praise
"Fifty-three writers invite their fortunate readers into poetry's 'space of freedom'—a territory that affords refuge, revelation, and yes, revolt, in lives too often circumscribed by the cruel boundaries of citizenship 'status."
—MEGAN MARSHALL, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
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"This breathtaking collection of poetry across the migrant diaspora does what politics cannot: speak honestly about the paradox of being hated yet invisible. It's the soul food I needed."
—AARTI SHAHANI, bestselling author Here We Are and award-winning journalist, formerly undocumented
A collection at once both carefully and playfully curated, Here to Stay resists easy labels in favor of shining the spotlight on writers in some way affected by the U.S. immigration systems' politics of exclusion. By turns joyful, furious, contemplative, funny, and revolutionary, the featured poets in this anthology invite further reading in the world of undocupoetics."
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—ALEJANDRA OLIVA, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration
About the Anthology
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From the indomitable writers and activists organizers of Undocupoets, Janine Joseph, Esther Lin, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, comes an anthology gathering some of the best work that foregrounds the poetry and poetics of writers who are currently and formerly undocumented in the United States, and also includes work by poets who come from mixed-status families across the undocumented diaspora in America.
In a broader effort to archive these significant contributions to American letters, this timely and distinctive anthology showcases the wide range of backgrounds, styles, formal experimentations, and aesthetics practiced by such contemporary poets according to and/or apart from their experiences and identities.
Here to Stay is a collection of honest, searing, and evocative poems interspersed with short personal narratives. Deeply intimate, these works explore how to exist in the space between the familiar and the unknown, between the safety of silence and the desire to share. Highlighting the significant insights of such experiences, this brilliant compendium challenges misconceptions of what it means to live and write within, through, and/or against documentation in modern America and offers a vision of the boundless possibilities of our art.
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