The distance from home in Valerie Bickett’s ‘Karpathos’

• By Lauren Shows
• Published: November 10, 2026

When Valerie Chronis Bickett arrived on the Greek island where her father was born, she brought his ashes in her backpack.

As she writes in “Triumph” — the opening volley of her memoir in verse, “Karpathos,” named for the same island — she traveled from Ohio with her husband and three grown children, and through the airplane window, she’d seen the shape of the island she recognized from maps — “a stretched-out question mark, dots on both ends.”

The return 
eighty years later 
of the father’s daughter 
to the father’s birthplace. 
I don’t do what I said I would do, 
kneel down and kiss the ground. 
Later, I tell myself, 
when no one is watching, I will; 
but I never do.

Bickett will read from “Karpathos” Thursday, Nov. 12, at Tesseract Books. In speaking with the News this month, she said the memoir’s fulcrum is the idea of ambiguous loss — broadly, an unresolved grief, and in this case, a lingering ache tethered to the distance from one’s familial culture, fissures in one’s identity. It’s a feeling, Bickett said, that she’s spent years trying to articulate.

“You’re not here, you’re not there, and it really is a loss,” she said.

In the book’s afterword, Bickett recalls an early childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, where she spoke Greek with her grandparents and moved between two family households she could enter without knocking. Her parents moved the family to Cincinnati when she was 7.

“I had no say in the decision to leave and no one explained the enormity of what was taking place,” she writes. “This exit from the community that literally baptized me into this life, this removal from the garden, this departure from my, dare I say, native tongue, explains better to me my mixed feelings to this day when I hear Greek spoken.”

Disconnection from the language of her parents and grandparents, she said, is another kind of grief; though she was exposed to the Greek language at a young age, English became her primary tongue, and she found herself at the edges of conversations she couldn’t enter anymore, as her parents “purposefully kept the language away” from their children so they could talk privately.

“Twice I’ve been back to Greece, and I couldn’t even talk to them,” Bickett said. “I have been on the outside of people speaking Greek so much in my life with family, and I’ve tried to learn it 10 times. So if I maybe belong there, or somewhere, it’s the same — it is ambiguous loss.”

Bickett’s relationship with her father required its own kind of excavation. Bickett’s previous full-length collection, “Triandafilo,” published in 2009, explored her relationship with her mother, Ann Bouloukos, about whom she had already amassed many poems over years of writing. Her father was less present in her work.

“I put him out of my mind; my feelings about him were buried,” she writes in the preface to “Karpathos.” “In 2013 I assembled poems for this second book and was surprised how few there were and how shallow.”

Over more than a decade, she returned to writing about a man who left the island of his birth before he could speak. In memory, she said, her father’s exuberance reminds her of Zorba the Greek — but she said he had a “vicious temper underside” he wouldn’t examine or talk about with her.

“The only thing I can figure is it came from the grief that he never paid any attention to,” she said.

Her father, Vasso Paniotte Chronis, came to the United States as an infant after his own father, a spokesman for Greeks living under Italian rule, fled Karpathos; his wife and children later followed. The family settled in Charleston, South Carolina, then moved during the Depression to Birmingham.

“They thought they were always going back,” Bickett said.

That expectation distinguished her father’s family from her mother’s, whose parents had emigrated seeking a better living.

“What happens to the relationship between a father and a daughter when the father has been kidnapped from his landscape, has lost his footing — all the while being fed lines about melting pots and bootstraps?” Bickett asks in the afterword. “What in fact happens to any relationship in the new country when the foundational relationship of growing-plant to soil is broken?”

The poems in “Karpathos” are tender and brutal by turns, moving forward, backward, sideways through time. She invokes her father’s birth, life and death amid images of her own childhood, as in “My First Memory,” when her father carried her into a hospital and relinquished her to a tonsillectomy that, with “leftover terror oozing out of the walls,” felt like an assault.

She recalls, as a student in “Roselawn Elementary,” being ostracized for her cultural otherness by fellow students, and years later assessing the same classmates, “these seven-year-old unfriendly babies,” with an older eye — how they “came to their parents two years after the big war ended/how overseas and here these children rode in/on an out breath.”

The poems visit and revisit the divisions following her father’s second marriage and their strained adult relationship, digging toward an understanding of the hurt. She writes in “A Father Like I Had”:

What are you trying to do?
he asked me once
speaking about all my therapy.
Clean it up?

You can’t do it, Valerie;
you can’t clean it all up.

While working on “Karpathos,” Bickett said she encountered another, unexpected grief after moving from Cincinnati to Yellow Springs in 2022. Her children had attended Antioch, she had visited for years, and she welcomed the opportunity when a Home, Inc. house became available. After years of aiming to find home, she was here — but she wasn’t home, at least not yet.

“It wasn’t just about getting to know people,” she said. “It was getting to know and feel comfortable in the landscape. … I haven’t been on the streets a thousand times, and so I felt like I was living on a movie set in the beginning. That’s how I felt — now less so, because we keep coming back to the same house at night.”

That feeling of being untethered, even as one settles, a “deep feeling of homelessness,” she added, comes from many different things: “Not just place — it comes from the kind of parents I had, and I think it’s going to stay with me.”

But the ancestors whose losses she is still trying to understand also offer a kind of company. Near the end of “Karpathos,” in “Help,” Bickett imagines her forebears standing behind her, stretching back in unending lines:

so that whatever we face
we do so with a horizon-full
of extras behind us extending
whether we see them or not
their free hands.

“Sometimes my therapist feels like the ancestors have too much of a hold on me,” Bickett said with a laugh. “But they found somebody to get their stories.”

Doors open at Tesseract Books at 6:30 p.m. for Bickett’s Nov. 12 reading, with the program beginning at 7 p.m.

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