Safety Trip by Anna Papadopoulos

Anna Papadopoulos speaks in the voice of the poet as the conscience of the society. She speaks for the children of the Robb Elementary School tragedy – “Dark-soled shoe stains in the center / where we’ve left our marks.” She grieves a child falling from an airplane leaving Afghanistan – “A firefly flashes in the sky, will freeze / time like those stars that we can’t see.” She also explores her own immigrant experience: “And we don’t think about our old neighbors, who warned their kids about us: Don’t they know – they’re in America now.” This is a poet who puts on the page what others are afraid to admit they are thinking, bearing witness in “A Twenty-Three-Year-Old Dies Opening the Door.” We live in unusual times – “how easy it is to disappear / to lose focus like this pixelated face…” Even so, she chooses to find beauty in the world. In “A Warm February Day in New York,” she continues to let the world speak to her and weave its magic: “the sunset drops its pink hue like a crocheted baby’s blanket. / The Verrazano Bridge’s arches are sculpted in the shape of a woman’s breasts.” Anna Papadopoulos thinks deeply about everything and writes with power, depth and beauty.

–Diane Frank, Author of While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems

Anna Papadopoulos’s marvelous first chapbook, Safety Trip, embarks on a family’s immigration “adventure” between the redefined worlds of exile and belonging. Traveling through generations, from World War II and the Greek Civil War to contemporary New York’s lily blooming “alongside a ditch,” the poet understands how to recover ordinary beauty against the odds “until you’ve worn / loss like your Sunday best.” These personal stories reflect survival’s human “thread bearing the weight / between us” in times of crisis and joy. Employing the acquisitive eye of a novelist with the lyrical inventions of a poet, Papadopoulos visually maps out an emotional space one can enter in any language and still call home.
–Elena Karina Byrne is the author of five poetry collections and programming consultant The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.