The Promised Land

*While half the world swept west,*

*we trickled eastward, one by one,*

*single-file, like fugitives. Next stop:*

*Abu Dhabi, where my father had** a job,*

*and money, for the first time **in years* . . .

Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from present-day London to North America, André Naffis-Sahely's bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: labourers, travellers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed.