Adrianne Kalfopoulou

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight as I wait for her whom no one can command. Whatever I cherish most--youth, freedom, glory-- fades before her who holds the flute in her hand --Anna Akhmatova, "The Muse" (translated by Kunitz)

Adrianne Kalfopoulou lives and teaches in Athens, Greece.  Her first collection, Wild Greens, is available from Red Hen Press and Amazon.com.  Her chapbook Fig won the EDDA Women's Chapbook contest from Sarasota Theater Press.  Her poems have been published in Nimrod, Phoebe, Pavement Saw, and other journals.  She has also written widely on American literature and women's studies.

Photo by John Psaropoulos

Her Fruit Hunger I remember the way yiayia loved the pomegranates, how she reminded me not to forget to get kilos of them in October, their season, when the mottled yellows were splashed in lucid pinks, the reds a burgundy so rich you felt them deepen into velvet; those fruits still hanging from their cut twigs, sometimes already cracked, showed their jeweled seeds like a sexy opening you can’t resist; she ate them that way too, her aged fingers deft as her nails cut into the pulpy flesh, the layer of clustered seeds that clung to the insides; fuchsia pearls she brought to her lips and sucked with so much satisfaction I knew nothing fulfilled her more.

Red Hen Press, U.S. $13.00, ISBN:  1-888996-58-7 Click here to order:  Wild Greens

Read poems and aritcles on the web: Featured poet at Valparaiso Review of Wild Greens at Valparaiso A review of Beth Ann Fennelly's Open House at Valparaiso Poems:  "Glass," from DMQ Review "Corinna's Bones," featured on Verse Daily Five poems from the chapbook Fig, Sarasota Poetry  Theater Press "Athens, 1943," from Poets Against the War He wants me to describe it

Schedule of upcoming appearances:  Readings

from her column,  The Furies: Academic Phallacisms Speaking the Mind

contact the poet at akalf@hol.gr

Advance Praise for Wild Greens: It is a difficult thing to write simply and eloquently with quiet and intense passion in ways that are unflinchingly personal but also fold the reader into the depths of history and myth.  This is partly what Adrianne Kalfopoulou's poems do for me.  They are also celebrations reminding me how words can perform acts of affirmation and joy no matter what griefs or complex experiences they contain.  These poems attain the beauty of ritual. --T. Alan Broughton These are poems composed at the crossroads of exhilaration, exhaustion, eros and resilience, and they are as melodic as they are devastating.  There is essential Greek history written here, personal and ancient, cut into on linen-covered tables and consumed like wine as dark as the sea:  "A blue you could drink." --Rebecca Byrkit, author of zealand