From: Immigrant Diaries

Nishi Chawla’s sixth volume of poetry, From: Immigrant Diaries is a diverse collection of poems on the lives, experiences, dilemmas, and existential situations of immigrants across the globe. In these series of poems as slice-of-life — of the people she has encountered or known or imagined — poet and playwright Nishi Chawla draws a multifaceted picture of what it is like to be an immigrant. Whether it is her own cultural ambivalence or the struggle of a myriad cast of immigrant characters, Chawla holds a mirror to reality with the keen sense of a dramatist and the larger-than-life heart of a poet. Her poems address issues concerning the promise and pitfalls of migration, the attitudes and responses of the native born toward the influx of immigrants from a broad spectrum of countries, and the desire of immigrants to fit in or rebel, in highly personalised poems.