GREEN CARD & OTHER ESSAYS
Áine Greaney
In Green Card & Other Essays, Áine Greaney invites her readers to follow her three-decades' long journey from Irish citizen and resident to new immigrant and green card holder to dual citizenship that now includes naturalized U.S. citizenship. These first-person essays offer an intimate perspective on the challenges—fear, displacement, assimilation and dueling identities—faced by many immigrants from all countries. They explore what inspires us to commit to a new country—and what holds us back. As a collection, Green Card exemplifies the power of storytelling to build bridges of understanding and a deeper joy in our shared humanity. 88 pp. ISBN: 978-1-7324514-2-1
True, this book is a delight to read—but please don’t let the good humor, the deft turns of phrase, the endearing bemusement, and obvious likeability of the author fool you: Green Card is an acutely serious contribution to the literature of immigration in our times. Áine Greaney’s deeply interior vignettes also look outward, asking us to rethink something at the heart of the American experience, the psychic and societal consequences of being an American–in-process in a nation that is itself in process.
—James Silas Rogers, author, Irish-American Autobiography and editor, New Hibernia Review
Áine Greaney’s deft, subtle, and deceptively quiet essays lead from the every day incident to the heart-breaking but never sentimental examination of the nexus of identity and "home." She dexterously shows the immigrant glancing back to her past even as she looks to the uncertainties of the present and hope of acceptance. In this collection, the reader can also find that the foreign becomes warmly familiar.
—Sandra Hunter, author, Trip Wires
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