New Immigrants to Canada

Poetry Book

This collection of poems is the result of two research projects undertaken by Denise Gastaldo, as principal investigator, in collaboration with the Community Health Centre Women's Health in Women's Hands.

The first part presents poems generated after the exchanges between participants of three focus groups in 2002. The poems are mainly made of the women's own words and story-telling style, even though some sentences were cut, others repeated, and a few words added to create poems that convey to the general public the emotions (and ideas) experienced firsthand in the groups.

In the second part, the participants of the study Revisiting Personal is Political: Immigrant Women's Health Promotion took the idea of doing poems into a different direction. Participants identified key topics that represented the groups’ discussions on the process of recent immigration for women and those were written as poems.

These poems express a myriad of emotions which reveal the complexity of immigrant women’s experiences.

Please click here for a full copy of the poetry book.