After All We Have Travelled by Sarala Estruch
PBS RECOMMENDATION SPRING 2023
After All We Have Travelled, the debut poetry collection by Sarala Estruch, is a distinctive journey across time, continents and cultures, through memory and generations of family history, exploring the long legacies of empire and its personal and political effects. It is a story of intergenerational grief, vulnerability and disconnection, as well as the enduring powers of love, connection, and embarking into motherhood.
Estruch’s illuminating poems explore the losses incurred by forbidden interracial and intercultural marriage, and is a potent reclamation of voice, story, and mixed-race identity. Equally courageous and formally bold, this is a compelling collection of lyric poems that address how we risk vulnerability and loss in order to connect with others – and the self.
Praise for After All We Have Travelled:
“Sarala Estruch in After All We Have Travelled unspools a cross-continental family history, and invites us in to share a story at once familiar and unique. What is most striking throughout is the clarity and vividness of the pictures she makes from distant memories, and the tug of conflicting, barely spoken emotions as she moves between countries, the now and the past, in language that is simple, elegant and always beguiling. If you’ve ever felt unmoored or adrift from your family – or even yourself – the poems here will help to ground you; in their lens they see you, see all of us.” - Rishi Dastidar
“After All We Have Travelled is a book of journeys and legacies, turnings and travails, which introduces us to a consummate storyteller, a poet of layers and depths. Sarala Estruch is unafraid of the fissures, the kinks, the binds, involved in piecing together one’s identity as a poet of mixed race and multiple heritages, through the fraught gifts of language. These poems dive into the pools of longstanding grief, of loss and estrangement across generations and continents. At once formally original and tremendously moving, this book charts the transformation of ‘a mouth / drowned at high tide’ who fights her way back up to air, learning to speak – and sing – again.” – Sarah Howe
Nine Arches Press
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