The Re in Refuge

(Paperback)

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The re in refuge is a collection of linked essays that investigate ideas of refuge, broadly defined, from the intimacies of romance to the promises of the nation state.

Written over the span of a decade, the collection shapes experiences and events that interrogate their larger political and social contexts. The emerging European refugee crisis, yet to become headline news, frames the opening essays, with stories of those lost in their passage across the Mediterranean. In 2014 Italy and the United Kingdom ended funding for naval rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea, and the influx of refugees into Greece reconfigures some of Athens' neighborhoods. A once abandoned school building becomes a squat where Kalfopoulou and other volunteers engage with refugee communities that include families from Afghanistan, Syria, and Kurdistan. As Kalfopoulou notes in "The Parts Don't Add Up" a visual essay, "Embedded in the word refugee is refuge," suggesting that the vectors of shelter have as much to do with what one carries of culture and place as they are about a tangible home.

Author Bio

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 , , was translated into English with Katerina Iliopoulou. She lives in Athens, Greece where she teaches in the English Literature and Modern Languages Dept. at the American College of Greece.