The Diaspora Sonnets

In 1972, after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, Oliver de la Pazs father, in a last fit of desperation to leave the Philippines, threw his papers at an immigration clerk, hoping to get them stamped. He was prepared to leave, having already quit his job and having exchanged pesos for dollars; but he couldnt anticipate the challenges of the migratory lifestyle he and his family would soon adopt in America. Their search for a sense of home and boundless feelings of deracination are evocatively explored by award-winning poet de la Paz in this formally inventive collection of sonnets. Broken into three partsThe Implacable West, Landscape with Work, Rest, and Silence, and Dwelling MusicThe Diaspora Sonnets eloquently invokes the perseverance and bold possibilities of de la Pazs displaced family as they strove for stability and belonging. In order to establish her medical practice, de la Pazs mother had to relocate often for residencies. As they moved from state to state his father worked to support the family. Sonnets thus flit from coast to coast, across prairies and deserts, along the way musing on shadowy dreams of a faraway country. The sonnet proves formally malleable as de la Paz breaks and rejoins its tradition throughout this collection, embarking on a broader conversation about what fits and how one adaptsfrom the restrained use of rhyme in Diaspora Sonnet in the Summer with the River Water Low and carefully metered Diaspora Sonnet Imagining My Fathers Uncertainty and Nothing Else to the hybridized Diaspora Sonnet at the Feeders Before the Freeze. A series of Chain Migration poems viscerally punctuate the sonnets, giving witness to the labor and sacrifice of the immigrant experience, as do a series of hauntingly beautiful pantoums. Written with the deft touch of a virtuoso and the compassion of a loving son, The Diaspora Sonnets powerfully captures the peculiar pangs of a diaspora that has left and is forever leaving.