Poets from around the world give eloquent voice to the trials, hopes, rewards and losses of migration. Each year, millions join the ranks of intrepid migrants who have reshaped societies throughout history. Most recently, Middle Eastern and African people have risked their lives to reach safety in Europe, while central Americans have fled north seeking asylum. But whether they are refugees from war or violence, political exiles or immigrants in search of education, opportunity and freedom, these travellers share the challenge of adapting to being strangers in a strange land. Border Lines brings together more than a hundred poets representing more than sixty nations - Imtiaz Dharker, Ruth Padel, Bernadine Evaristo, Derek Walcott, Mahmoud Darwish, 'Dreadlock Alien', Dunya Mikhail and Hedi Kaddour, to name but a few. Their poems tell moving stories of displacement and new beginnings in the UK, France and Germany, Canada and the United States and challenge us to reexamine our own society from a new perspective.

In poems of compassion and social justice, Mihaela Moscaliuc probes borders and memory to work through, and further complicate, understandings of belonging - from places (including her native Romania) and histories, to ways of knowing, loving, and grieving. If the wounded populate these poems, so too do goats, black swans, centipedes, dismembered dolls, and wandering wombs. The ekphrastic sequence on Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy honors stories of Roma people while addressing issues of (mis)representation and epistemic violence. As in previous collections, cemeteries become sites of power, holding the living accountable.

The poems in Immigrant Model explore issues of individual and communal identity in the face of conflict, conflicting "truths" or histories, and uprootedness. They explore the notion of homeland as it relates to one's roots, adopted space, psychological terrain, gendered body. If the book reads as a collage of voices or shards rather than as a book with an identifiable arc, it's because that's the only way the poet has managed to answer, so far, the question, "What is it like to be of this world and this world and this world, while also of the elsewhere skirting these worlds?"

Carmelia Leonte's voice, sharp and beautifully quirky, strikes singular notes in the Romanian and Eastern European poetic landscape.