As the recently released ethnic neighborhoods map of New York City has been in the news for omitting some key ethnic enclaves such as Little Italy in Manhattan and Astoria’s Greektown, while the Department of City Planning’s Language Explorer, a new interactive web tool, revealed that most Greek speakers live in Queens, Professor Nicos Alexiou shared his latest poetry collection, titled ‘Queens, New York: Poems of a Multicultural Milieu.’
Published in English by Somerset Hall Press of Boston, the book is available online and serves as a “poetic map” of the borough, “not merely as a geographical location, but as a landscape of memory, migration, multiculturalism, and personal quest,” as noted in a new release about the book.
“With the publication of this collection, Alexiou completes his second poetic trilogy, following his first trilogy under the collective title ‘The Garden of Lost Vespers’,” the news release continued. “While the first trilogy explored landscapes of memory, loss, and existential searching, the second broadens its horizon toward diaspora, migration, multilingualism, and the encounter of different cultures.”
“‘Queens, New York’ stands as the culminating work of this poetic cycle, creatively weaving together themes and motifs that have occupied the poet for years while offering a mature poetic meditation on place, identity, and human coexistence,” the news release said.
“The collection consists of 25 poems organized into four sections, each functioning as a successive cycle of experience. The reader follows a journey from the physical landscape of Queens to historical memory, from the collective experience of migration to existential reflection, and from the awareness of loss to the search for solidarity and creative resistance.”
“Particularly significant is the presence of two major poetic figures whose voices resonate throughout the collection: Constantine P. Cavafy and Walt Whitman,” the news release added. “Cavafy appears as the poet of memory, exile, and historical consciousness, while Whitman emerges as the poet of place, democracy, and human fellowship. Alexiou does not imitate their voices, rather, he creatively incorporates them into his own poetic geography.”
“Queens is presented as a living organism, a place where different languages, religions, histories, and cultures coexist,” the news release said. “Poems such as ‘Howard Beach’, ‘Bohemian Hall’, ‘Queens Botanical Garden’, ‘Astoria’, and ‘Whirlpool – East River’ transform neighborhoods, landmarks, and landscapes into symbols of a global experience of movement, displacement, and settlement.”
“A special place within the collection is occupied by the poem ‘Across’, which has been translated into many of the languages spoken in Queens today,” the news release noted. “This multilingual presence is not merely a translation project but an integral part of the book’s poetic conception. The poem becomes a symbol of coexistence and solidarity among the communities that make up New York’s ‘World’s Borough’, highlighting the linguistic and cultural diversity that defines the area.”
The book includes a foreword by Queens College President Frank H. Wu who writes: “Nicos Alexiou is a man of Queens, renowned as the World’s Borough… His verse speaks of the experience of those who remember —and are compelled to do so—a land they have left behind, yet which influenced them with the indelible impression of their heritage, and those who explore the new locale that they have settled, engaging with strangers on the streets.”
Nicos Alexiou was born in Volos, Greece, in 1959 and studied Economics in Athens before moving to New York in the mid-1980s to pursue graduate studies in Sociology. Since 1990, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at Queens College, CUNY, where he received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
He is also the founder and director of the Hellenic American Project at Queens College, a research and community-based initiative dedicated to documenting the history and culture of Greek-Americans.
Alongside his academic work, Alexiou has published six collections of poetry. His poems have appeared in Greek and American literary journals and anthologies. He has received several literary distinctions and is a member of the Greek Authors’ Society in Greece, and he also serves as President of the Greek American Writers Guild in New York.