Bad Diaspora Poems

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

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

This collection feels special, even in the hands, a total privilege to read. Mehri is an incredible poet, thinker, seeer; ridiculously intelligent, irreverent, and with the ability to laugh, bitterly, in the face of some of the saddest personal and world history. Her unique poetic eye cuts through everything

Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the Lions

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 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

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

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

Sensitive, tender, measured, hopeful… Bad Diaspora Poems is a classic

Magma

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*

One of the most unique and striking poetry debuts

Raymond Antrobus, author of The Perseverance

Rich, playful, often funny

Sunday Times