Migrant Wish, Moni Brar

Winner of the Editor’s Prize for 2023, Moni Brar’s Migrant Wish is a collection of thoughts on the scars of migration, the impossibility of belonging in two places at once, and the loneliness of it all. Offering reflections on brown women’s experience, Brar entwines her words with a vivid tale of settling roots away from ancestral land. In Migrant Wish, the speaker longs to conform to a social reality full of paradoxes, while being told to return “home,” despite that place no longer existing. In this collection of sparse yet affective poems, Brar dives deep into conversations about what integration looks like—sometimes it is a suit, while other times it is a denial of familiar beliefs in favor of newly acquired ones.

“In Moni Brar’s stunning and deeply felt Migrant Wish, text and image converge to skillfully map the ways in which the precarious forces of history and story write and rewrite belonging and betweenness into the “veins on every plot of skin.” Formally inventive, by turns elegiac and reclamatory, these poems bravely reckon with questions of migration and dispossession, while finding within familial ties and cultural community fierce forms of resistance and strength. ‘We wait / for the landscape to become ruin— / to become // memory’ writes Brar, in this memorable and moving debut.”
-Michael Prior, author of Burning Province

“Gutsy, grounded, and evocative, the poems in Brar’s collection rise and fall with fierce lucidity, affection and conviction. A generational talent.”
-Ali Bryan, author of Coq

“With Migrant Wish, Moni Brar turns the soil of memory for an accounting and an account of how family stories entwine and strain, enfold and inform. Here the fronds of voice and history clamor over the latticework of colonialism, claiming space for another way of knowing and being.”
-Derek Beaulieu, Banff Poet Laureate