Bad Diaspora Poems by Momtaza Mehri

Join us at the bookshop to listen to Momtaza Mehri read and talk about Bad Diaspora Poems, the much-awaited debut collection from a remarkable poetic voice.

Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.

Momtaza Mehri is an award-winning former Young People's Poet Laureate for London and winner of the 2019 Manchester Writing Prize. Her writing has featured in the Guardian, POETRY, Granta, Wasafiri, Bidoun, The White Review and on BBC Radio 4.

The definition of diaspora is the dispersion of people from their original homeland. But what does it mean to write diaspora poetry?

Mehri's exhilarating debut collection poses this question, spanning the waves of movement to and from Somalia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, taking us from Mogadishu to Naples, Lampedusa to London. We arrive at the present day, where these inherited histories and silences have endured across generations.

Mixing Mehri's own family's experience with the history and stories of many others, Bad Diaspora Poems confronts the ambivalent nature of speaking for those who have been left behind. These are essential poems about our diasporic age.

Chairing Mehri, we have Fahad Al-Amoudi, a writer and editor. He is the winner of the White Review Poets Prize 2022 and has been shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poets Prize. His work appears in The Poetry Review, Wasafiri and Mizna. His debut pamphlet, when the flies come, is published by ignitionpress.

In his new debut pamphlet when the flies come, Al-Amoudi blurs the lines between national and personal memory. His poems are rooted in the specificity of family and place, with the trappings of myth and fabulation. The speakers are restless, yet alert to the minute details of the world against which we experience their coming of age.