Re in Refuge

Adrianne Kalfopoulou is the author of three poetry collections, most recently A History of Too Much, and three prose collections including On the Gaze: Dubai and its New Cosmopolitanisms. Her work has appeared in journals, chapbooks and anthologies including The Harvard Review online, World Literature Today, Slag Glass City, Hotel Amerika, Dancing Girl Press and Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis. A collection of poems in Greek Ξένη, Ξένο, Ξενιτιά was translated into English with Katerina Iliopoulou. She lives in Athens, Greece.

“Lyrical, evocative, and heartbreaking. These powerful essays are equal parts pleasure and pain, like pressing into a sacred wound.”—Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee and Who Gets Believed?“Reading The Re in Refuge, I recalled Bauman’s ‘Nowadays We are All on the Move.’ But we move in different ways, with different costs, destinations, belongings, languages, meanings, homelands, Gods, genders, dolls, wounds, papers, losses. Kalfopoulou’s home country, Greece, becomes a crossroad of all the differences that are shaping our century—a touristic destination, a place of economic downfall and authoritarian rise, the ‘gate’ of refugees to Europe. Adrianne Kalfopoulou writes about well-known subjects—traveling and refugees—with moving originality. She invites the ‘you’ of the reader to pay attention to what the ‘I’ might not see.”—Gazmend Kapllani, author of A Short Border Handbook and Wrongland“Remembering and re-membering the ghosts from wars and exiles past in the vivid lives of those with whom she lives and works, Adrianne Kalfopoulou has woven a cradle and rocks it with a lilting song of wonder and lament. This is an epic narrative telling of the horrors and the wholeness in our times, a fugue returning again and again in theme and variations to the way belonging is an event, a fleeting encounter, a movement of the heart. A refuge.”—Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair: Refugee Integration through Languages and Arts, University of Glasgow