Oliver de la Paz’s collection of poetry, “The Diaspora Sonnets” illuminates the immigrant experience with meditations on the meaning of home and family bonds, reflecting on the role of memory and nostalgia, and the power of looking forward when forging a new life in a new land.
The poet laureate of Worcester and associate professor at the College of the Holy Cross, joined The Culture Show to celebrate national poetry month and discuss the collection of poetry which won the 2023 New England Book Award for Poetry.
A member of Kundiman, an arts organization dedicated to fostering Asian American writing, de la Paz began the project as an exchange with his creative community.
“The poems started out as actual postcards that I was writing to other Asian American writers, and I figured a sonnet is the perfect size for a postcard, so I would send these mini poems out to various friends,” he said. “After a while I had accrued almost 30 or 40 sonnets, and I thought ‘Oh, I have something here. Let me sit down with them and think about whether I was trying to tell a story.’ And it turned out, I was very much telling a story.”
The poems are personal, about family bonds and their collision with the diasporic experience.
“We all have a story, and the story I was trying to tell was the story of trying to find home, or understand exactly what home is.”
You can listen to the full interview from The Culture Show above. Tune in to the full show daily at 2 p.m. on 89.7.
