The Deportation Center

"Conversations About Home" takes place in the deportation center, where the speaker is met by many questions and comments about her home country, her journey to her new country, and her status as an immigrant. The deportation center is a microcosm of the speaker's new country, and so it is a place where she feels overwhelmed and unwelcome, but also grateful to be alive.

The New Country

In many poems, the characters are in or know someone who is in a new country far from home. This country is never named, and it may be different countries in different poems. The grandfather in "Old Spice" is somewhere different from his native Somalia, as is the narrator in "Conversations About Home" and Maymuun in "Maymuun's Mouth." In "Conversations About Home," this new country is cold, unfamiliar, and unwelcoming, whereas Maymuun changes herself and seems to adapt well...