A History of Too Much

by Adrianne Kalfopoulou

Overview

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597096126
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/23/2018
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Adrianne Kalfopoulou is the author of two collections of poetry, several chapbooks, and a book of essays, Ruin: Essays in Exilic Living, all from Red Hen Press. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Duende, Superstition Review, Hotel Amerika, the Harvard Review online, Kindled Terraces, American Poets in Greece, Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis, and Borderlands and Crossroads; Writing the Motherland. She chairs the English program at Deree College in Athens, Greece.

Table of Contents

I

The Startled Dreams of the Fallen in Spring 17

Those Days 19

The Evening the Referendum Was Repealed 21

Hemorrhaging Map 22

Slowly 23

The Taxi Driver Laments 24

The History of Too Much 27

My Athens Streets Have This to Say 28

This City 29

Fatherland 30

Ungodly 31

Promise 32

Erasures 34

Reading with Ethel 35

II

Skin 39

Because the News Was Bad 40

First Audition 42

Clothing the Dead 43

Stopover in Baden-Baden 44

Exilic 46

Invitation 47

Refusing to Be Demeter 48

Winter, Why? 49

Because Happiness Is Temporary, Uncertain & Hospitable 50

Missing the Plane 52

In a Pomegranate Time 53

Dear 54

Xxx … 55

The Return 56

Kinds of Places 57

The Wound, a Mouth, an Eye 58

This Surface 60

Let Yourself Forgive 62

The Road 63

III

Yellow Wind 67

Where the Contour Lies 68

Lunar 72

Coming Down the Mountain Before Dark 73

Gate E2 76

Oblessive Ache 77

The Stranger Joy 78

Plateia Mavili 80

The Hour of the Dumpsters 82

What I Wish Might Be Reaped 83

Gaze 84

The Goodbyes 85

Sea 88

These Days 90

Poem in Pieces, a Log 91

Notes 99

Editorial Reviews

When I sit down to read Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s poems or essays, I find myself sitting up straighter, more awake and attentive to the words in front of me, to the world. Her most recent book, A History of Too Much, responds to the Greek Euro crisis with tenderness, ferocity, and urgency that startles and dazzles. The images evoked and questions posed haven’t left me—just as was the case with her essay “Transitional Object, a Grammar for Letting Go” that we had the honor of publishing. Adrianne was kind enough to chat with me via email about her creative process, working across genres, and the complex bittersweetness of her work. —Ashley Farmer

“Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s luminous chronicle of love and debt in the time of the Greek Euro crisis, A History of Too Much, is powerful lyric testimony to the courage, humor, and brave resistance with which ordinary people faced augurs of loss in Greece, where the beauty of ‘the oregano’s thick perfume, the sapphire sea’ remind them of a heritage of beauty and sacrifice, as the title poem puts it. ‘It felt so much bigger than me,’ says the speaker of the magnificent hybrid poem that caps the collection, an assemblage of the voices and visions of historic change, which is, like History itself, a tour de force.”—Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth

“The ‘too much’ that piques the reader’s interest in the arresting title of these poems does double service: it sounds a cry of anguished exasperation uttered by this collection and comments on the way private life has been massively invaded by public upheavals. A startling theme, viewed with unexpected ambivalence, is hope—or rather ‘the carcass of hope’—that in these poems seems fated to end with ‘passionate disappointment.’ As the immigrant daughter of political exiles, I grasp that theme viscerally as Kalfopoulou pursues it through marvelous use of sensory details; attention to the voices and narratives of individuals, named and specified; love poems both tender and erotically vivid; memories of the dead; encounters with the maimed but still-living; physical vestiges of World War II and its victims, and travel accounts full of foreboding amid strangers in nocturnal surroundings.”—Rhina P. Espaillat, author of Playing at Stillness and Her Place in These Designs

“This is how the best contemporary poetry serves—as linguistic performance of an uncommonly attentive, empathetic soul making what sense it can of the vertiginous phenomena spinning before us. In terms of both content and style, these poems perform a necessary recognition of how the past is everywhere present, of how presence is ever imminent in what passes, and—most importantly—of how our every choice matters.”—Scott Cairns, author of Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems

From the Publisher