Melbourne-based poet Shilpa Taneja Wason has released her debut collection, What the Suitcase Still Holds, a lyrical exploration of migration, memory, and the emotional residue that quietly trails every departure. The poems, though deeply personal, speak a shared truth: that leaving one life behind to begin another comes at a cost not always visible.
Originally from India, Wason has spent years navigating the contradictions of belonging to two places at once. Her poems sit gently, inviting readers to listen to the murmurings many migrants recognise but rarely say aloud. The silence after missed funerals. The jolt of hearing your name pronounced the old way. The clumsy festivals abroad that feel like a faded photocopy of childhood celebrations.
“These poems were written from the in-between,” says Wason. “They came from the quiet ache of choosing a different life, one filled with opportunity but also absence.”
Wason draws inspiration from the Welsh word hiraeth, which describes a longing for a place that may not exist anymore or perhaps never truly did. Through 21 poems, she gives language to the homesickness that doesn’t always announce itself. In To My Children — I’m Sorry, she writes of the widening gap between generations, of children growing up in a new land, far from grandparents they will never truly know. In I Did Not Get to Say Goodbye, she captures the bitter sting of mourning from afar, a ritual displaced by time zones and livestreamed loss.
Her verse rarely seeks to resolve these feelings. Instead, it sits with them. One poem cuts to the heart of fractured identity with stark clarity:
“Belonging, it turns out, is greedy.
It wants all of you, your accent, your memories, your God.”
Wason’s writing has already begun to strike a chord. Early readers have called the work “a mirror for anyone who has left what they once called home.” For some, the poems are reminders of sacrifices that were never quite named. For others, they are a quiet affirmation that the loss, the guilt, the small grieving, it’s all part of the story.
One of the most discussed lines comes from I Am Every Immigrant:
“I am the victim of my own choice.”
Even the closing lines of the book resist sentimentality. In What I Know Now, Wason offers perhaps the gentlest truth of all:
“Peace doesn’t look like joy.
It looks like getting through the day without an apology.”
There is no false closure in these poems. Just a sense of presence, of someone who knows what it means to carry a history that doesn’t always unpack neatly.
Wason, who balances writing with a career in technology marketing, says the poems were born from a place of stillness and honesty. “I wanted to honour what gets lost in the move,” she says. “Not just what’s gained.”
What the Suitcase Still Holds is available now on Amazon globally.
For readers who have ever sat awake at odd hours watching family WhatsApp groups light up from another continent, who have wished their kids could grow up speaking the language they dream in, who still pause when a familiar smell takes them somewhere they didn’t know they missed, this book will not explain those feelings, but it will keep them company.
Buy it here: https://www.amazon.com.au/What-the-Suitcase-Still-Holds/dp/9369531769
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