Breakfast Wine

Breakfast Wine

"With machete sharpness and magical imagery, Poppe extols the allure and apprehension of Kurdistan's people as she embraces their culture and attempts to prepare them and herself for an uncertain future. A joyous, sobering, and spirited memoir of place and the chance encounters that can shape a lifetime." -- Booklist Starred Review        Dress-obsessed and directionless, 44-year-old Alex Poppe can't get her life together. A business analyst, turned actor, turned teacher, she works a dead-end marketing job under a mammary gland-fixated man and still waits tables to make ends meet. A chance encounter with an acclaimed journalist encourages her to accept a teaching position in northern Iraq, which charms with a heart and a fist.     Dining with a pistol-packing hitman, being thrown off the back of a truck during a humanitarian aid drop, and unknowingly working alongside one of Sweden's most notorious sex offenders are colored-glass pieces of information that fall together in a turn, educating Alex in Kurdish culture and politics beyond what her students teach her in the classroom and what she experiences as a Western woman living in the Middle East. There are earthquakes and building fires and a small war juxtaposed against the senseless, drug-fueled death of a good friend and the bone chilling aftermath of the security police's investigation. Alex navigates teaching online during the COVID lockdown with the help of WhatsApp before her father's unexpected passing pushes her to return to the US.     Blending memoir, personal essay, local topography, and culture, Breakfast Wine is a frank, human story of pursuing an unconventional life and finding a way home.   For readers interested in hybrid narratives, Middle East nonfiction, women living abroad, teaching abroad, unconventional memoirs, expat memoirs, and late-blooming life changes, Breakfast Wine is the book for you! "Vivid in her details, unblinking in her honesty, Alex Poppe has rendered a complex, interwoven personal narrative that is urgent and moving at every turn. Its images precise, its language fierce yet lyrical, its heart on its sleeve, Breakfast Wine sets its stakes on a whole range of human experience. In a line that we want —that we need—to be true, Poppe insists, 'In the bubble of breath and body we form, there is exhilaration and release.' If that is so, then Breakfast Wine plunges toward the marrow of that very way of being." — Richard Deming author of This Exquisite Loneliness "In a time when America's role in the world seems as nebulous as ever, Breakfast Wine confronts that issue with blazing consideration and rare grace. Due to her work as an English-language instructor and humanitarian-aid volunteer in Kurdistan and beyond, Alex Poppe put herself out in the world in ways so few Americans are ever willing to. Yet it's her voice, literary and direct and yearning, that'll linger with you long after you finish her story." — Matt Gallagher author of Daybreak " Breakfast Wine is an extraordinarily immersive memoir from a writer with a first-class mind. I was struck again and again by Alex Poppe's insights and her experiences related to the complexities of living abroad as a single woman, in particular, the gender-based hypocrisies and sexual predation (and its apologists) she encountered. This is also a book about finding one's way in the world as an artist and an intellectual. Breakfast Wine is a terrific book deserving of a huge readership." — Christine Sneed author of Please Be Advised "Alex Poppe's Breakfast Wine follows a series of accolades and prize-winning books. This one should win her a prize for bravery. Breakfast Wine is an engaging, intimate, eye-opening portrait of not only the dangers of traveling abroad but more so of a singularly lively and courageous young woman who refuses to surrender her desire to experience and know the world despite its frequent ugliness and evil." — Randall Silvis author of Two Days Gone "Breakfast Wine is immersive, honest, and completely absorbing. Expertly composed, its stories cover an astonishing range from displacement to home, from heart-wrenching tragedies to unexpected levities. At every step of this gripping journey, Poppe considers complex lives and places with empathic attention to detail, emotion, and meaning. This is an extraordinary work that will reverberate long after reading." — Charlie Hailey author of Campsite: Architectures of Duration and Place " A remarkable braiding of the geopolitical and intimately personal, Alex Poppe's memoir, Breakfast Wine , plumbs the depths of yearning. Adventure, knowledge, purpose, understanding, agency, belonging—these are just a few of the things Poppe yearns toward as she travels the world and (un)settles in Iraq as a teacher during the complicated tumult of the past couple of decades. Told in innovative structures and exquisite language, Breakfast Wine is a page turner; it is an eye opener."