Inspecting Wastelands: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9789358463156)

Inspecting Wastelands: Poems, Noeme Grace C. Tabor-Farjani's second collection

of poetry, oscillates between presentist fugitivity of the here-and-now and the

regal dreamlands of what could have been. The poems in this collection span

from North Africa to the Southern Philippines, from Tripoli in the Maghreb

to Cagayan de Oro in Mindanao-thematically touching on outsiderness in the

diaspora and even in the homeland, and staying true to the unspoken creed of

belongingness to nowhere. In this collection, Tabor-Farjani's veering towards

polyvocality is at its best: an elegy to the bygone, a quarantine diary, a love song

to a daughter, a dream journal, an evocation to maternal ancestors, a letter to a

grieving friend.

Beyond domestic liminalities and the suburban cityscape, Tabor-Farjani, as a poet

and as a surviving witness to the world, once again proves herself as a native

of the crevices between sentience and sleep, between higher thought and the

quotidian, between memory and the mythic.