by John Palen (Author), Hayley Haugen (Editor)
The title poem of Riding With the Diaspora doesn't come until the end, but facets of the diaspora experience - scattering, displacement, migration, homesickness, alienation, otherness -build toward it throughout. Here are poems about displaced indigenous Americans and their migrant European displacers; descendants of enslaved Africans and refugees from Nazism; the poor, the elderly and the ill, alienated from society and their own bodies; conflicted products of small-town upbringings; even seeds and microbes, scattered westward across the plains with the unsettling "settlers" of American expansion. These provide a unifying theme - one which also offers moments of reconciliation and grace - to a book of solidly crafted, humane and powerful poems.