A simmering anxiety underpins Homelands , the quietly arresting debut collection by Eric Ngalle Charles, a Nigerian poet who now resides in Wales. One poem that captures this sense of uneasy displacement is “Zugunruhe,” which takes its title from the German word for “migration restlessness.” The poem opens with the image of a bird, whose “black feathers glitter” as “[s]he smiles despite wounds / on her left ankle.” For Charles, the migratory bird is a metaphor of sorts for all migrants, and its
