Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants

Poetry. Elena Georgiou's second collection, RHAPSODY OF THE NAKED IMMIGRANTS, prompts us beyond the question "Where are you from?" to more complicated questions regarding multiple migrations, invasions, post-colonial freedom, and the ability to board international flights. "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. "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.... Remarkably brave"--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 ... a `map ... of silk countries,' folded and unfolding"--Bhanu Kapil. A choreography of names, places, and the forbidden worn by figures over a shared landscape--urban, rural, in between.