The global landscape is dotted with border crossings that can be particularly perilous for displaced women with children in tow. These mothers are often described by their various legal statuses like refugee, migrant, immigrant, forced, or voluntary, but their lived experiences are more complex than a single label. Reclaiming Migrant Motherhood looks at literature, film, and original ethnographic research about the lived experiences of displaced mothers. This volume considers the context of the global refugee crisis, forced migration, and resettlement as backdrops for the representations and identity development of displaced women who mother. Situated within motherhood studies, this book is at the interdisciplinary intersection of literature, life writing, gender, (im)migration, refugee, and cultural studies. Contributors examine literary fiction, memoirs, and children's literature by Ocean Vuong, Nadifa Mohamed, Laila Halaby, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Terry Farish, Thannha Lai, Bich Minh Nguyen, Julie Otsuka, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Shankari Chandran, and Mary Anne Mohanraj. The book also explores ethnographic research, creative writing, and film related to refugee studies. The border-crossings discussed in the volume are often physical, with stories from Afghanistan, Syria, Vietnam, Japan, Iraq, Canada, Greece, Somalia, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and America. The borders that displaced mothers face are examined through frameworks of postcolonialism, nationalism, feminism, and diaspora studies.

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 stassis—a transliterated Greek word for a stop or a pause—that 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 used by Frost to describe Yeats' poetry; of this new collection Powell notes a range of "different types of utterance, of poems ambitious and experimental in a volume that is tough, tender and honest throughout." As Passion Maps suggests, these are poems of experiences that have mapped, as much as experiences that have become maps; there are the inevitable first cartographies of family: a father "stoic/ in brutal combat", a mother who "would have preferred to sing her words" that expand into the broader mappings of "bygone lives,/" and "the lyric ruin of cities", an America of "New World opportunity" and an old world of "whole towns/now erased by the grass." In his review of Wild Greens in the Crab Orchard Review, Jon Tribble describes the "bitter and the sweet" of poems that "test our palates" and "remind us that the bread and meat and fruits and greens of life come with many flavors and at a cost that is as dear as it is worthwhile." The same could be said of Kalfopoulou's second collection though here we have the voice of a poet who has broadened her style to include more of the world.

A History of Too Much begins with poems that address an Athens undergoing the first ravages of political and financial crisis; the inhabitants of these poems voice extravagant losses and the unpredictable, are often torn between a desire “to flee, but flee where?� The gods and goddesses will still be called upon, but Demeter is nonplussed in her mourning, Alexander the Great drunk, and the statues of antiquity exposed to the anarchies of spray-painted slogans and thrown Molotovs. If history’s excesses are exhausted they are also reinvented in the idiom of the contemporary moment; here where “the costumes were all off� and “the actors overplayed their parts,� there is a story to tell: “The light was almost gone, / the road now dark.�

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 verbal noise that hovers around the Hellene like a cartoon bubble transforms important decisions (buying that lovely island house, getting into a car accident, applying for a teaching job at the Greek university, raising a hybrid daughter), into a transcendent read. Nicholas Papandreou, author of A Crowded Heart What happens when the common things of everyday life become a constant negotiation of one's place in one's world? This is the predicament of the migrant, of the millions of people who try to make their life in a different place. This book is full of love, and yet also full of frustration and anger: Adrianne Kalfopoulou desires to be a part of this world of ancestry, but is forced to admit she can't, that one cannot enter the same river twice. Jose Itzigsohn, Brown University In Broken Greek, Adrianne Kalfopoulou takes us beyond the whitewash into the heart of Greek culture, as well as its spleen. She guides us through the labyrinth of Athenian and Patmian streets and creates a map of the contradictory Greek psyche. People argue loudly in public, are fatalistic about politics and the law while family and neighbors unconditionally help their own. In her vividly wrought odyssey she learns that "Greece eats her children," but also how to speak "a language of vulnerability." Aliki Barnstone, translator of The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy, A New Translation

The linked personal essays in "Ruin" weave together meditations on teaching, friendship, motherhood, love, the financial meltdown in Greece, the shared language of politics and advertising, Occupy Wall Street, the Parthenon Marbles, and a host of other subjects into a blistering interrogation of identity and loss. Kalfopoulou's Athens and New York are twinned sites of perpetual dislocation, palimpsests of political, economic, cultural--and personal--crisis. The refugee, the immigrant, the fragmented 'I' charted in these essays--all are studies in exilic living, fugitives from history, pilgrims wandering the wreckage of late capitalism.