You have grown old
remembering the homeland in chains,
the many roads to exile,
the future you dreamt - always of freedom...

He stops talking. He rests his right hand firmly on Sweet Mother’s shoulder, looks at her with a covetous eye. The police is your friend; I want you to see me as a friend, take me as your special friend, your special friend who will turn your frustration into cash...

Shoneyin‘s ‘For the love of flight’ not only highlights the direction of her feminist poetics but accentuates the themes, the narratives of everyday life evident in her other collections of poems. As always, she locates her poetics within the feminist tradition that resists norms, rebels against patriarchal attitudes and “hones the flints of her existence”...