Human rights activist Pamela Uschuk’s seven poetry collections include Crazy Love (American Book Award) and Blood Flower. Translated into twelve languages, her work appears widely in Poetry, Ploughshares, and others. Awards include Best of the Web, Dorothy Daniels Award (National League of American PEN Women), prizes from Ascent, New Millenium & Amnesty International. Editor of Cutthroat, Truth to Power, and Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, Black Earth Institute Fellow, Uschuk lives in Tucson. She leads writing workshops at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and is featured in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day. She’s finishing her memoir, Of Thunderlight and Moon: An Odyssey Through Cancer.
Refugee deals with refugees of many kinds—political refugees, refugees from racism, from domestic violence, from environmental destruction and disease, specifically cancer—and their stories of cruelty and courage, hardship, and hope to overcome the most daunting of circumstances.
Taking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“There is a position in yoga called “the shining heart.” This is how Pam Uschuk has approached her poems in Refugee. Pam Uschuk is on fire. She has carried her song and vision across deserts and over mountains. Witness and beauty undivided.” — Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Fallen Angels
“With tenderness, expansive compassion, and profound gifts of radiant description, Pamela Uschuk considers so many ways people may be estranged and lost in this precious, difficult world. With brave ferocity, her poems in Refugee navigate new vision and reconnection, so desperately longed for right now and always.” — Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist
The first line of Pamela Uschuk’s extraordinary new book Refugee throws down the gauntlet to all who are guilty of less than full attention to the blood-drenched, war-torn contemporary world: “So you think you can live remote…”
Pamela Uschuk is a poet, political activist, and wilderness advocate. She is also a cancer survivor, and in this week’s segment of KNAU’s series PoetrySnaps!, she shares a poem that moves through the experience and endurance of chemotherapy. Uschuk says her poem Green Flame was inspired by one particular sight in nature.
A mordantly tender triumph rich with natural imagery. Uschuk’s poetry collection calls out authoritarianism and social injustice. This moving set of poems offer messages of hope as it addresses timely issues. It’s divided into four sections—“Skull Song,” “Axis,” “Liquid Book of the Dead,” and “Speaking of Angels and Ghosts”—and deals with a broad spectrum of […]
“Since all around us refugees seem to be fleeing from something, one must ask from what they themselves flee—and that it’s hard to imagine there is anywhere left one can go to find refuge. That is the dilemma at the core of Pamela Uschuk’s collection Refugee (Red Hen Press, 2022), a book of poems in four parts that […]
“’So you think that you can live remote / from city streets paved with bullet casings, / mass shootings in churches, refugee mothers in cages,’ Pamela Uschuk questions in ‘A History of Morning Clouds and Contrails,’ challenging both herself and the reader. Fortunately, it’s a challenge well met; Refugee reveals itself through a tapestry of well-crafted poems […]
Pamela Uschuk is, in my view, one of our country’s best poets. Her new book, REFUGEE, shows precisely why. Her poems rise up from careful craft, scattering beauty, detailed descriptions, merged with an anger at injustice and a persistent hope for the world that we could create. Her insistence, that her poems are not just pretty […]
At this pivotal point in history, the word “refugee” holds many different meanings and connotations. As Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine progresses and more than five million Ukrainians flee their homes, anyone paying attention to the media hears the word “refugee.” Naturally, people are inclined to immediately think of the traditional definition of the word […]
At this pivotal point in history, the word “refugee” holds many different meanings and connotations. As Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine progresses and more than five million Ukrainians flee their homes, anyone paying attention to the media hears the word “refugee.” Naturally, people are inclined to immediately think of the traditional definition of the word […]
