Objects from around the world retain the imprint of the triumphs and sorrows of the people who touched them.

Acclaimed poet Patrick Woodcock grants breath and memory to objects he has encountered during more than thirty years as a migrant writer. In tales that move between laughter and rage, tenderness and defiance, he allows them to speak of what he has seen and felt in geographies and histories that range from Iqaluit, Nunavut, to Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Kurdish North of Iraq and beyond. Whether a boat, a baby carriage, a strip of bark, or a stone, each narrator bears witness to the quiet beauty and enduring sorrow that mark the human world. Beneath them all runs a single current—a profound love of life, and a tireless belief that injustices must be righted and human triumphs, however fragile, must be honoured.