“Foreign” is a poem by Carol Ann Duffy that seemed to first appear in her poetry collection Selling Manhattan. That collection was initially published in 1998. If you want to know when the poem was published, 1998 is probably a safe answer. If you want to allow for some room for error, you could say mid-to-late ’90s.

As for why Duffy wrote “Foreign,” you have several ways to address that question. You could talk about the possible autobiographical reasons that Duffy had for writing “Foreign.” If you don’t know, Duffy was born in Scotland; her parents were working class and her grandparents were Irish. Her socioeconomic status and her ethnicity might have lead her to think of herself as foreign or to identify with outsiders. You might want to review how the English have historically viewed Irish and Scottish people as different, the Other, or foreigners.

You might also think about how when the poem was written links to why the poem was written. The 1990s was a decade marked by pronounced globalization. People and goods were moving around the world at a notable pace. Maybe Duffy wrote the poem to reflect the feelings of displacement that globalization can produce. Maybe Duffy wrote the poem to try and point out that, for all the supposed interconnectedness, people were still quite isolated.

In the poem, it doesn’t appear as if the speaker has made meaningful friends or relationships in their new city. There’s no part in which the speaker has a substantial conversation. They seem quite alienated from their surroundings.