Momtaza Mehri is an award-winning poet and essayist. She is a former Young People's Poet Laureate for London and winner of the 2019 Manchester Writing Prize. Her writing has featured in the Guardian, POETRY, Granta, Wasafiri, Bidoun, the White Review and on BBC Radio 4. She works across criticism, translation, anti-disciplinary research practices, education and radio. Bad Diaspora Poems is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 2023 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
An exceptional debut collection that reinvigorates ideas around
diaspora, migration and home. Wide-ranging and ambitious, her
poetry shimmers with erudition and linguistic exquisiteness, while
also having an emotional heart. Drawing on global cultures, Mehri
is a truly transnational poet of the twenty-first century whose
words pulsate out into the world-at-large
*Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other*
Mehri’s work is not just politically vital but poetically alive
*Sunday Times, *Books of the Year**
A poet like Momtaza Mehri comes only once in a generation. Mehri is
a writer of refined insight, audacious imagination and artful
technicality - a genius. Bad Diaspora Poems is a feat, its scope of
movement both in time and geography is immense, you are swallowed
into its voyage. This is an essential collection in the Black
diasporic discourse
*Caleb Femi, author of Poor*
Mehri brings unflinching discursive skills to verse that melds
criticism, autobiography and essay while still achieving a crisp
sonic momentum characteristic of lyric poetry... Mehri is a
dazzling voice that refuses to speak from a podium
*Guardian*
Rich, playful, often funny
*Sunday Times*
Momtaza Mehri's debut collection refuses the presentist and egoist
pitfalls of the lyric and avoids the reductive slipstreams and
intellectual constraints of identity politics. With her dexterity
of tone and breadth of reference, her sense of history and
geopolitical scope, Mehri develops a unique new poetic, rich in its
connectivity and attentiveness. Bad Diaspora Poems satirical
insight and humane outlook are energising, radical and
remarkable
*Jack Underwood, author of Happiness*
One of the most unique and striking poetry debuts
*Raymond Antrobus, author of The Perseverance*
Momtaza Mehri is in the advance party of a daring new turn in
global anglophone poetry. Though to say 'new' doesn't do full
justice to her innovation; the word implies adherence to tastes or
fashion but what we have in Bad Diaspora Poems is something rarer
altogether: the poems collected here, being poems with a timeless
sense of style, are destined to last even as they speak so
incisively to our present moment
*Kayo Chingonyi, author of Kumukanda*
Masterful... The poems gathered here take nothing for granted. They
revel in the slippages of belonging and identity and strive for
something greater, something closer to a revolutionary kind of
love
*Victoria Adukwei Bulley, author of Quiet*
Momtaza Mehri is a groundbreaking new voice. Raw and sophisticated,
Bad Diaspora Poems is a gloriously rich mosaic, offering insights
into our planet's increasingly exiled populations, the plight of
refugees, and a passionate longing for the homeland
*Pascale Petit, author of Mama Amazonica*
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