THE MIGRANT DICTIONARY by Rafael Mendes

'The Migrant Dictionary, by Rafael Mendes, is a sequence that challenges our conventional sense of poetic form. Using the dictionary entry as its shaping principle, it troubles ideas of fixed meanings in a world of instability and change. Chosen words range in tone and implication (‘Arrive’, ‘Border’, ‘Home’) and there are gaps too: letters and experiences not easily defined. Imagined scenes are interwoven with reported events, challenging our assumptions about the limits of racism and structural violence in Ireland. This tension between formal limits and the free imagination is everywhere evident, revealing the imprint of the Irish legal system on the lives of the marginalised.'

- The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust, 2025.
 
Rafael Mendes is a Brazilian-Irish migrant whose work has recently appeared or has work forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Propel Magazine, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He was featured in Poetry Ireland's Introduction Series in 2023 and was awarded the 2023 Irish Writer's Centre/Tyrone Guthrie Centre Lacuna Bursary. He is a PhD candidate in Latin American Studies at Trinity College Dublin.

Published by HOWL
32 pages
150 x 220 mm