Hope on the Border: Immigration, Incarceration, and the Power of Poetry

Poet Michelson (Swimming Through Fire) offers a candid account of the horrors refugee children face in American immigration detention centers and how poetry can help them hold onto their dreams. Michelson began offering poetry workshops to detained migrant children in 2015 in hopes that writing would help them envision “a future beyond the... agony” of their circumstances. Poetry, for his students, became a “conduit” for hope, faith, and resilience (“The important thing is to keep going,” one child wrote, “even if you have to adopt a fake smile, because no one knows, nor could they imagine, what has happened in our lives”). Michelson shares horrifying details of the abuses and bureaucratic nightmares asylum seekers encounter at the Mexican border, and calls for humane alternatives to detention, which might involve a federal and local system of residency permits, healthcare, legal aid, and housing support. While the author’s critiques of the immigration system aren’t new, his meditations are heartfelt, and the inclusion of his students’ poetry does a valuable service in centering perspectives usually excluded from public debates about immigration and migrant welfare. The result is a surprisingly uplifting call to reform an unjust system. (Oct.)