What Home Is Isn't That--by Kimberly Alidio

Wonderful review and essay by Kimberly Alidio about The Diaspora Sonnets.

Oliver de la Paz’s sixth collection, The Diaspora Sonnets (Liveright, 2023), is a fascinating contribution to diasporic aesthetics. Compared to the accretive, organic quality of Wangechi Mutu’s collages, for example, The Diaspora Sonnets is a poetry machine running through a selection of small, sensory-rich moments in a family’s migration experience. References to large-scale global structures of colonialism and economic imperialism—characteristic of the diasporic art discussed so far and also relevant to de la Paz’s family history—are muted, or, more precisely, transmuted into a personal lyric of family and place. Born in Manila and raised in the remote high deserts of eastern Oregon, de la Paz emigrated to the United States as a child in the 1970s. His family moved for a time along Pacific Northwest migratory labor routes. Immigration is a linear story of departure and arrival, but The Diaspora Sonnets does not tell it straight, so to speak: moments of familial upheaval before and after emigration arise and return as recurring primal scenes. The very title of de la Paz’s collection indicates the layered intricacies of his family history and his poetic craft.