"Language is the translator": Formal and linguistic disruption in the migration poetry of Cecilia Vicuña and M. Nourbese Philip

In the contemporary globalised world, many people experience or are affected by migration. Either as a willed or a forced response to political, social or economic alienation, migration often involves displacement followed by continuous adjustment to new and immediate environments. Post-1989 migration poets, that is, those who have either experienced migration themselves or address migration experienced by others, respond to such experiences with poetry that both represents them thematically and engages them with formal and linguistic experimentation. Their poetry, like migration itself, exhibits precarity, yet at the same time is mouldable and adaptable to new contexts, forms, readings, and importantly, languages.