Danticat gathers writing by Haitians in the United States, arranged in five movements: childhood, migration, the half or first generation, return, and the future. The contributors write about lives split between two countries, sometimes plainly, sometimes with a haunted edge.

The range is wide. Jean-Robert Cadet recalls a Port-au-Prince childhood spent as a restavek, enslaved in a household; Dany Laferriere remembers a boyhood in Petit-Goave with the grandmother he adored; Marie Helene Laforest describes discovering that the whiteness she had in Haiti became blackness in the United States. Others write about a detained refugee whose one wish is a red dress and the dignity it stands for, about alienation, about marrying across the color line, and about the frustrations of helping, including the visitors who take more from Haiti than they leave behind.

What holds the collection together is the divided self of the emigrant, turned over from many angles.