Antiemetic for Homesickness

By turns playful and tender, offering a formally-various exploration of migration, community, and nursing… there is honesty, musicality, a powerful heart – Seán Hewitt * The Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2020 *Captivating…playful…moving, witty and agile…These poems have a tended quality, as though Ante’s kindness as a nurse extended to them. She is an unforced poet with a lightness of touch and fortitude, not neglecting to see her situation within a wider cultural and historical context – Kate Kelloway * Observer Poetry Book of the Month *A poetry of rapturous images and riveting conscience – Tracy K. SmithRomalyn Ante is a poet to fall in love with. A flower of both the Philippines and the Black Country, her vivid, sensual poems weave a fascinating and moving story of migration and loss, caring and tenderness – Liz Berry[A] tour-de-force * Jhalak Prize *What might it mean to survive the incandescent distances between here and all we’ve ever left behind—the languages, the myths, the keepsakes and names? How can we return to lost things and those who love us, relearn what draws away from memory? Romalyn Ante traces paths back through such questions with the grace of lancets, illuminating scars and landscapes, celebrating the “invisible…goddesses of caring and tending” in this brilliant collection. It is something of miracle to experience a debut that charts our “dislocated world” with such incisive generosity. I am beyond grateful for these poems—each one pulsing with “the rhythm of a shockable heart.” – R.A. VillanuevaAnte’s poems are like embers, pared back to a slow-burning emotional core whose intensity she sustains elegantly throughout the collection – Stephanie Sy-Quia * Times Literary Supplement *Poignant, beautiful, and meditative writing on movement - living in a foreign country, being away from one’s family, speaking a language not quite your own… This is possibly the most beautiful thing I have read this year – Maria Lewandowska * The Poetry School Poetry Books of the Year *Ante writes with a voice that I can only imagine develops when the act of care is central to one’s life. She minces no words. Antiemetic for Homesickness manages to stand so coherently as a collection on account of how the poems’ polyphony of voices interact with one another. We are at the mercy of her retort to those who underestimate immigrant workers – Holly Loveday * Wild Court *Romalyn Ante’s debut collection presents an important and magical display of culture and perspective. There is always that memory that pervades someone’s mind of what it is to migrate from one’s home to another place. How are the people back home? The people who were left behind, how are they? Have they changed? [Antiemetic for Homesickness] aims to tackle those questions with folklore and spirit and honor – Shaun Anto * Columbia Journal *

Romalyn Ante FRSL is a Filipino-British poet, essayist, and editor. She was born and bred in Lipa, Philippines. She was 16 years old when her mother - a nurse in the NHS - brought the family to the UK. Her debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto, 2020), was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She is the co-founding editor of harana poetry, a magazine for poets who write in English as a second or parallel language. She was awarded the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship in 2021-2022, sits on the editorial board for Poetry London magazine, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in the West Midlands where she works as a registered NHS nurse and psychotherapist, specialising in the mental healthcare of young people.

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