Introduction

The anthology Borders in the Mind challenges the conventional notion of 'home' by exploring how displacement, memory, and identity intertwine for those severed from familiar landscapes. Through a diverse collection of poets from diasporic and marginalized communities, the volume redefines belonging as an emotional, rather than physical, construct. These works confront the psychological frontiers erected by migration, exile, and cultural hybridity, offering urgent reflections on how consciousness itself becomes both a prison and a refuge.

Exploring the Psychological Frontiers

At the heart of the anthology lies the tension between external borders and internal landscapes. Poets dissect the paradox of inhabiting multiple worlds: the ache of ancestral homelands felt through fragmented family stories, the alienation of navigating foreign languages, and the existential disorientation of carrying a home that cannot be mapped. Phrases like "the body remembers what the eyes forget" recur, underscoring the somatic weight of unbelonging. These poems reject nostalgia as mere sentimentality, instead framing it as a tool to reconstruct identity in the void left by physical displacement.

Redefining Home Beyond Geography

The anthology's most radical gesture is its rejection of home as a fixed location. One poem traces lineage through spices in a kitchen, another through the inflection of a half-remembered accent. Home emerges as ephemeral-a melody, a gesture, a recurring dream. Poets draw on metaphors of architecture and decomposition, evoking homes as "collapsing terrains we carry in our ribs." This reframing resonates with diasporic experiences where rootlessness becomes a form of rootedness, and impermanence itself is the only constant.

The Role of the Poet as Cartographer

The contributors assume the dual role of witness and cartographer, sketching emotional topographies often invisible to geopolitical maps. Their verses map the ache of borders drawn in bureaucracy, the shadow of lost time, and the friction of clashing cultural paradigms. By blending experimental forms with traditional poetic structures, the anthology mirrors the duality of its subjects: stranded between inheritance and reinvention. This tension pushes readers to question who gets to define belonging-and who is erased in that definition.

Conclusion

Borders in the Mind is more than a literary collection; it is an act of resistance against the erasure of diasporic voices. By reimagining home as an interior and communal phenomenon, the anthology invites readers to confront the porousness of identity in a globalized world. For those wandering or wondering, these poems offer no easy comfort, but instead a vital testament: that belonging lives not in soil, but in the stories we tell ourselves to survive.