Hope on the Border
Immigration, Incarceration, and the Power of Poetry
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From an award-winning poet comes a humanizing story of immigration shown through the lens of undocumented, unaccompanied children and the poems they write.
“Heartfelt . . . a surprisingly uplifting call to reform an unjust system.” –Publishers Weekly
In heart-wrenching prose, Seth Michelson faces the U.S. immigration crisis head on—by learning and sharing the stories of migrating people fleeing violence and poverty, and by leading workshops for minors held inside a maximum-security detention center. Highlighting the experiences of people desperate for safety, Michelson tirelessly fights for justice and their freedom. Guided through the powerful medium of poetry, the children share their pasts, struggles, hopes, and dreams. Among them, Carlitos, a 13-year-old boy who escaped a gang to try to make a safe and honest life on his own after his mother’s death, and Karla, a teenager whose family begged her to flee for safety after she was shot. Remarkably, they and other children from similar circumstances express themselves with honesty, passion, and optimism for a better future.
Michelson also introduces us to migrating people at the border, including a woman who was chased from her home amid violence, and a dedicated father who was arrested and beaten while searching for work to make a more secure life for his wife and daughter.
Whether relating experiences in a Mexican refugee camp or a U.S. immigration detention center, Michelson’s prose is brisk and gripping, offering hard-earned insights into ways we might create a better immigration system that treats all people with dignity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Michelson (Swimming Through Fire) offers a candid account of the horrors refugee children face in American immigration detention centers and how poetry can help them hold onto their dreams. Michelson began offering poetry workshops to detained migrant children in 2015 in hopes that writing would help them envision "a future beyond the... agony" of their circumstances. Poetry, for his students, became a "conduit" for hope, faith, and resilience ("The important thing is to keep going," one child wrote, "even if you have to adopt a fake smile, because no one knows, nor could they imagine, what has happened in our lives"). Michelson shares horrifying details of the abuses and bureaucratic nightmares asylum seekers encounter at the Mexican border, and calls for humane alternatives to detention, which might involve a federal and local system of residency permits, healthcare, legal aid, and housing support. While the author's critiques of the immigration system aren't new, his meditations are heartfelt, and the inclusion of his students' poetry does a valuable service in centering perspectives usually excluded from public debates about immigration and migrant welfare. The result is a surprisingly uplifting call to reform an unjust system.
