Settle

by Theresa Muñoz

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.

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Paperback

Published March 15, 2016

About the author

Theresa Muñoz was born in Vancouver, Canada to Filipino parents and now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. She wrote her PhD thesis at the University of Glasgow on the work of Tom Leonard.

She won a British Columbia Arts Council Award and has been a prizewinner in the McClellan and Troubadour poetry competitions. In 2018 she was a recipient of the Muriel Spark Centenary award, writing a sequence of poems based on material in Spark’s archive in the National Library of Scotland. In the same year she was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship.

Reviews

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an engaging book of two halves. The first half, about the experience of immigrating, is good and interesting. The adept use of detail makes some of the poems very vivid. The second half, about the experiences of digital life, is more intriguing; like the twentieth page of Google results which is the focus of one poem, this choice of subject matter provides fresh metaphors. Overall, the arrangement of poems and content feels balanced in a pleasing way.

(The cover designer should also be congratulated on coming up with something which is both sensible and appropriate to both halves of this volume.)