Description
PRAISE FOR THE IMMIGRANT’S REFRIGERATOR
Elena Georgiou’s exquisite collection could not be more timely. At a moment when America’s political response to The Other is triggering a national crisis of conscience, these poignant stories remind us of the vital role that human compassion plays in bridging ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic divides. Inside The Immigrant’s Refrigerator, the foreign and the familiar share and trade shelf space. Unspeakable sorrows and distant joys appear in the form of bacon, hummus, homemade bread. Papaya salad. Whatever the delicacy, Georgiou’s secret sauce is the essential goodness of humanity. Citizens of Maine nourish Somali immigrants with handcrafted chocolates. A refugee from Niger comforts his grieving host in Vermont by teaching her to savor Brie. Sustenance acquires profound meaning in these tales of endurance, hope, and the abiding power of quiet generosity.
—Aimee Liu, author of Flash House and Cloud Mountain
The Immigrant’s Refrigerator is a quietly devastating collection of stories about loners, craving love and connection, trying to survive in a world where war is always raging somewhere and happiness is a phantom of the future. That these loners are Americans as often as they are immigrants and refugees is this collection’s greatest strength. Elena Georgiou’s voice is quirky and surprising; her ability to turn a phrase upside down invites us to experience the world and ourselves in a new way. There are no easy answers in The Immigrant’s Refrigerator; Georgiou’s focus is on tipping a moment over the edge to find the broken pieces of our shared humanity. And yet, and still, it is a celebration of life in all of its scars and joys, chance and invention, awe and longing to be seen, and, over and over, a testament to the tender, transformative power of acceptance and love.
— Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, author of Hiroshima in the Morning and Why She Left Us
Elena Georgiou is a dazzlingly good writer. The thirteen stories in The Immigrant’s Refrigerator are stirring, wise, and keenly alert to the longings and contradictions that impel their beguiling characters. I loved this collection.
—John McManus, author of Fox Tooth Heart and Bitter Milk
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elena Georgiou is the author of The Immigrant’s Refrigerator (GenPop Books, 2018) Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants (Harbor Mountain Press), and mercy mercy me (University of Wisconsin), 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 work appears in journals such as BOMB, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, Gargoyle, Lumina, MiPoesia, and Spoon River Review. She is an editor at Tarpaulin Sky Press and the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College.
Georgiou is originally from London, England, where she spent the first twenty-seven years of her life. Since then, she has lived in the US — first in New York, now in Vermont. She maintains a website at elenageorgiou.com.
