An American poet, repatriated in the land of her ancestors, Adrianne Kalfopoulou is a consummate storyteller. Lucid, precise, and unflinching, Broken Greek stands up to comparison with previous accounts of the Greek experience, with great style. It's a lively and poignant journey to the gods and demons of present-time Greece. Stratis Haviaras, author of When the Tree Sings and The Heroic Age Unlike other writers on modern Greece, Adrianne Kalfopoulou gives us a powerful non-fiction narrative that goes against the romantic notions that most people have of this country. Her sensitivity to the...
An American poet, repatriated in the land of her ancestors, Adrianne Kalfopoulou is a consummate storyteller. Lucid, precise, and unflinching, Broken ...
It is a difficult thing to write simply and eloquently with quiet and intense passion in ways that are unflinchingly personal but also fold the reader into the depths of history and myth. This is partly what Adrianne Kalfopoulou s poems do for me. They are also celebrations reminding me how words can perform acts of affirmation and joy no matter what griefs or complex experiences they contain. These poems attain the beauty of ritual.
T. Alan Broughton
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It is a difficult thing to write simply and eloquently with quiet and intense passion in ways that are unflinchingly personal but also fold the re...
Passion Maps is a lyrical cartography of historical and biographical experiences, of the poet's lived and imagined mappings. The poems in this collection chart a world itinerary of stopping places, or stassisa transliterated Greek word for a stop or a pausethat transport the reader from locations of childhood memory to pauses of lost love, and lost life, through landscapes as disparate as Vietnam, Greece, New Jersey, and the Balkans. As poet and critic Joseph Powell described Kalfopoulou's first collection, Wild Greens, "the best of these poems make beauty ache," a phrase...
Passion Maps is a lyrical cartography of historical and biographical experiences, of the poet's lived and imagined mappings. The poems in th...
The essays in Ruin link meditations on teaching, friendship, motherhood, love, the financial meltdown in Greece, the shared language of politics and advertising, Occupy Wall Street, and the Parthenon Marbles into a relentless interrogation of identity and loss. Kalfopoulou s Athens and New York are twinned sites of perpetual dislocation, palimpsests of political, economic, culturaland personalcrisis. The refugee, the immigrant, the fragmented I charted in these essaysall are studies in exilic living, pilgrims wandering the wreckage of late capitalism. "
The essays in Ruin link meditations on teaching, friendship, motherhood, love, the financial meltdown in Greece, the shared language of politic...
On The New Cosmopolitan is an exploration of cosmopolitanism and its 21st-century manifestation in Dubai. “What do I see? Neon contours of a building at night. A near-empty walkway with a flashing monitor that reads: “Dubai Digital Park”; in the morning I see a concrete expanse of flat apartment rooftops amidst a humid, sand-infused horizon, the steaming heat of the desert temperature in August. Plasma screens along a walkway show various scenes of people eating, exercising, shopping, the only people I see. I am in an area called Silicon Oasis. Dubai, a city where 70% of the world is...
On The New Cosmopolitan is an exploration of cosmopolitanism and its 21st-century manifestation in Dubai. “What do I see? Neon contours of a buildin...
