Nettle's "Foreign Love" follows a newcomer in an unfamiliar city, surrounded by people who seem not to see her. The repeated "people, people" makes the crowd feel endless and cold, and the speaker's loneliness comes through in the line "Ignoring me, ignoring me." Then everything shifts: one person notices her, picks her out "of all the people," and falls for her.
The love that follows is complicated. The crowd "crushing us" pushes the two together, which suggests that need, not just choice, brings them close. They begin to move and act alike, and slowly become "the same." The poem's opening words, "Stranger, Slave, Chosen," return in the final lines, where being chosen turns into being a "slave" to the other person. The mood starts out isolated and uneasy, brightens briefly with the relief of being noticed, and ends on something heavier: a love that rescues the speaker from loneliness but also leaves her dependent. The poem seems unsure whether that counts as belonging or loss.