Permission to Settle fills in the blanks of the application for Permanent Residency with a series of memoir-based poems, capturing common aspects of immigration — the anxiety, and the bureaucracy of application, identity, foreignness, and inadequacy — all while exploring the sense of privilege that comes from the geographically and culturally close immigration journey from the US to Canada as a modern-day settler.
The poems investigate the implicit biases in the forms and the gaps between the messy reality of life lived and the structured and colonial system of boxes and check marks that still seek to categorize “the other” and harness it in the face of reconciliation. The reader is drawn in through the guise of the familiar, while the playfulness and self-revealing tone of the work reveal a poignancy of meaning and language.