Refuge

by Adrie Kusserow

Overview

Deeply cross cultural, humanitarian, political and global poems about how humans deal with suffering across the world. These are poems about cultures rubbing up against each other, war, refugees, child soldiers, spiritual refugees trying to find a home, and a mother who is witnessing these firsthand. Rare ethnographic poetry by a world traveling cultural anthropologist and human rights activist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938160097
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	04/19/2013
Series:	American Poets Continuum
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Adrie Kusserow is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, VT. Her most recent international field work trips support girls education (South Sudan – www.Africaeli.org) and Youth Media Literacy and Gross National Happiness in Bhutan. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, and a M.T.S. in Comparative Religion from Harvard Divinity School. Her debut collection Hunting Down the Monk was published by BOA in 2002, with a Foreword by Karen Swenson. She lives with her family in Underhill Center, Vermont where she was born and raised.

Table of Contents

Skull Trees, South Sudan 13

The Unraveling Strangeness 14

Bus Station, Kampala, Uganda 16

Lady's-slipper, Red Eft 18

Mud 22

The Crow 24

Indra's Net 25

Borders 27

Beneath the Sky, the Longing 29

Opening Day, Mukaya 31

From Heaven, Mother Theresa Looks Down on Daya Dan 33

Milk 36

Lost Boy 39

Young West Meets My East 42

Before His Execution, God Looks Down on a Yoga Class 45

The Hunger Sutras 48

Dinka Bible 51

War Metaphysics for a Sudanese Girl 53

Attiak Refugee Camp, Northern Uganda 55

Lord's Resistance Army 56

The Sweet Hereafter 58

Christmas Eve, Kampala, Uganda 60

Email Elegy 61

Moths 62

To Market, to Market 63

What to Give Her-A Confession 65

Yolk 68

The Adoration 70

Field Work Post Partum, Huddled Above Them, She Thinks of South Sudan 71

The Country of Your Garden 73

Acknowledgments 76

About the Author 77

Colophon 82

Editorial Reviews

There is no question that Kusserow, a professor of cultural anthropology, is well-versed in the conceit illustrated by her new book—that “the suffering of Kenya begets Uganda,/ begets my husband,/ begets me, begets Ana, begets her brother…” And from one perspective, Kusserow has taken a risk, bridging the experience of Sudan during its civil war, with that of Vermont, where a crow picking at compost triggers a reverie: “suddenly I knew how war/ must feel on the earth’s beleaguered back,/ the constant pecking.” Sometimes, however, Kusserow’s use of a simile and moralistic analysis to describe the brutalized population of a faraway place (a “freshly pummeled” woman “lies like pounded meat in the gutter”; boys walking a thousand miles to safety are “packs…roving like hyenas”) undermines her subject matter. At its best, this book asks how to make poetry from sufferings of others. Would refugees tell their stories how we tell them? Is a secondhand telling, exoticized, tantamount to a second banishment—stories rent from those who lived them? Kusserow could go deeper than she has to address these questions. (May)

Publishers Weekly

“Refuge is a book of tears of both despair and joy … This book reminds us how blessed sanctuary is.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Kusserow presents her awareness and self-consciousness to the reader. She often writes the familiar as alien … This collection grips the reader with jaggedness, inequality, horror, and the tenderness of nursing one’s children. A Vermont mother watches her son and daughter play in the stream having seen a Sudanese woman lying in the road. Ethnographic poetry has capacity to hold the enormity of war and a fight between siblings. Here, Refuge exists both for war torn nations and the narrator and her family.”
-Green Mountain Review

From the Publisher