The Longed For Longed For

The Longed For Longed For. Debut poetry collection by Sibani Sen. Cathexis Northwest Press.

This is a collection of poems voiced from the perspective of the migrant, the marginal and the estranged. It contains elegy, sorrow and ghost whispers that accompany the experiences of exile, loss, indentureship, and death. It emerges from my own history and ancestry in the East and West Indies, from mixed diasporas and migratory aspirations. Though these poems are rooted in my life, I hope to convey the M?bius loop of longing familiar to us all: the bind we can get into of wanting an elsewhere that is really a nowhere, or yearning for someone beyond reach-an absence that gives our lives meaning. At times, in these poems, I look for relief and reckoning in the inner life of the psyche and the imagination, in the bravery of love and the restitution of art, as well as finding succor in the natural world. In other moments, the lack of consolation brings wisdom. Even if the parted father and daughter will never reconcile, and there is no remedy for alienation, nor any redemption for a history of enslavement and its stolen futures, there remains for me, in each of these poems, an evolution into greater resiliency, and an awakening into the boundlessness of life. Although these poems are borderland elegies, they are modes of keening, desiring, grasping and, especially, surviving, that are universal. Existence, in these poems, is the condition of longing, with an invitation to solidarity, since we are all migrants in time.