Overview

Diaspora, a new collection of poems by Sheri Reda, reflects on ancestors, the starving worlds they left behind, and the adopted communities they scrambled so gamely to build. It uses direct language and vivid imagery to honor both ancient roots and modern aspirations, while observing-with love, humor, and occasional horror-the way tensions between them become an epigenetic inheritance. Grounded in vivid evocations of Chicago's Lakefront and its industrial West Side, the poems document a universal journey of disruption, longing, and acceptance. They explore the waves of identity and ambition that have roiled the city and revel in the tattered and triumphant love that holds it together. The poems ""smell of chicken soup, dough, scotch and water, smokes,"" says poet Luisa Igloria. ""They crack jokes and find their way through a ""city [of] bones and marrow."" ""This is not a diaspora you've read before,"" says Lucia Getsi, acclaimed author of Intensive Care. ""It's poetry as sorcery."" Poet Hayan Chara describes the poems as ""master classes in paying attention to the world."" Historian Rhiannon Koehler calls the book ""an antidote to our poisonous times.""

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Sheri Reda lives in Chicago, where she works as a celebrant, public speaker, and youth librarian. Her poems have appeared in Examined Life Journal and Eocene Journal of Environmental Humanities, and have been anthologized in The Healer's Burden (2020), The Nature of Our Times (2024) and the award-winning Dear Human at the Edge of Time. Her Memoir, Life is Like That (La Vita É Cosi) was longlisted for the 2026 International Creative Voices Award. Sheri is the author of Stubborn (Locofo Chaps/Moria Press, 2017).

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