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."
"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 wit
Rhina P. Espaillat, author of Playing at Stillness and Her Place in These Designs
"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. 'I
Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth
"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 c
Scott Cairns, author of Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems
