Settle

The Canadian and now Scottish poet, Theresa Munoz writes of migration and of our digital world, separate but not unconnected subjects. She does so with style and clarity, and a sense of the impermanence of the modern world. Settle is an engaging collection of poetry on matters that could not be more topical.

A digital native and an actual immigrant, poet Theresa Munoz has considerable personal experience of two subjects that dominate the present day: migration and technology. Born in Canada, she came to Scotland to work and study. Her journey echoed that of her parents, Filipinos who migrated separately from the Philippines in 1970, meeting in Toronto where they worked hard to build new lives. The first of these two sequences of poems, "Settle", reflects her family's experience of emigration over several generations. Although she writes of racism and homesickness, her journey has been a happy one and she has a positive take on uprooting herself and settling in another country. The second sequence, "Digital Life", looks at technology through the eyes of someone who grew up as part of the Facebook generation. Whilst she's an immigrant in the real world, Munoz is very much at home online. She finds humour and melancholy in her interactions with Google, Facebook, mobile phones and email, whether it be the frustration felt waiting for someone to text back, the highly stylised way people present themselves on Facebook, or an oddly empathetic relationship with the unvisited twentieth page of a Google search.