Refuge

(Paperback)

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Description

As an anthropologist, Adrie Kusserow's ethnographic poetry probes culture and globalization with poems about Sudanese refugees based in Uganda, Sudan, and the United States, especially the "Lost Boys of Sudan." The poet struggles with how to respond to suffering, poverty, displacement, and the brutal aspects of war. Much of this exploration is based in poems in which a mother is also bringing her family to a larger global arena.

Adrie Kusserow is a professor of cultural anthropology at St. Michael's College. Her international fieldwork supports girls' education in South Sudan and youth media literacy in Bhutan. She lives in Underhill Center, Vermont.

Reviews

"Refuge is a book of tears of both despair and joy ... This book reminds us how blessed sanctuary is."--Los Angeles Review of Books "Kusserow presents her awareness and self-consciousness to the reader. She often writes the familiar as alien ... This collection grips the reader with jaggedness, inequality, horror, and the tenderness of nursing one's children. A Vermont mother watches her son and daughter play in the stream having seen a Sudanese woman lying in the road. Ethnographic poetry has capacity to hold the enormity of war and a fight between siblings. Here, Refuge exists both for war torn nations and the narrator and her family." -Green Mountain Review

Author Bio

Adrie Kusserow is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at St. Michael's College in Colchester, VT. Her most recent international field work trips support girls education (South Sudan -- www.Africaeli.org) and Youth Media Literacy and Gross National Happiness in Bhutan. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, and a M.T.S. in Comparative Religion from Harvard Divinity School. Her debut collection Hunting Down the Monk was published by BOA in 2002, with a Foreword by Karen Swenson. She lives with her family in Underhill Center, Vermont where she was born and raised.