Here & Elsewhere

Twelve singular voices, each responding to a question that travels across oceans and generations: Where do you call home?

Here, within these pages, a father’s immigration story, shared with his bullied daughter, finds its echo in a suite of poems that trace the quiet weight of familial expectations. A two-part tale of a mining disaster, set deep in the mountains of Portugal, sits alongside a soldier’s letter written from a military barracks in Angola. High above the Azores, a widower drifts through a dream of lost love; elsewhere, a young man pleads with an ex for the return of his passport as anger gives way to forgiveness. For some, the journey circles back with a twist: You must go home again. One writer recounts the bureaucratic dance of claiming citizenship in their parents’ homeland; another follows a man’s pilgrimage to his family’s ancestral island to fulfill his sister’s final wish.

Uniting a dozen contemporary Portuguese Canadian writers, Here & Elsewhere is a vibrant record of cultural narratives—rooted in the homeland, yet always evolving, shifting across time and place.