Award-winning poet Elena Georgiou's second collection, Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants, prompts us to look beyond the question, "Where are you from?" to a more complicated array of questions regarding multiple migrations, invasions, post-colonial freedom, and the ability to board international flights. As the child of Cypriot immigrants, as a British immigrant herself, and as an ex-dancer, Georgiou is an expert in the art of moving—the choreography of words is the hallmark of this collection. Her poems invite us to consider what it is we are looking for, hoping for, and what we expect to find in the ever-changing landscape of our lives.
Elena Georgiou has the unbordered tongue of an immigrant. Her poems travel through the public and private geographies of citizenship, building homes made of bodies and language. Her work is an alphabet, a Greek chorus, a praise poem for the English language and its many tongues. It is your visa to the poetry of immigration.
--Lisa Birman
Elena Georgiou comes to us beautifully and unabashedly exposed. She reminds us, through the eyes of "immigrant" experiences, that we too must be our own "Expatriate Cartographer" if we are to navigate and survive the losses and gains of living through change and eruption. In writing that is remarkably brave, she sends us her "enclosed everything."
--Jenny Boully
Immigrant questions become questions of how to love, how to adhere to an "earth...cut in half." Elena Georgiou's beautiful book of poems is the "blossom" that falls to the train floor, it's the "ocean floor," it's a "map...of silk countries," folded and unfolding.
--Bhanu Kapil
About Elena Georgiou
Elena Georgiou is the author of Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants and mercy mercy me, which won a Lambda Literary Award for poetry, was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award, and was reissued by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2003. She is also co-editor (with Michael Lassell) of the poetry anthology, The World In Us (St. Martin's Press). Georgiou has won an Astraea Emerging Writers Award, a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, BOMB, MiPoesia, Lumina, Spoon River Review, Cream City Review, and Gargoyle. She is currently an editor at Tarpaulin Sky Press and a member of the faculty in the MFA program at Goddard College, Vermont.
