These Dark Skies

These Dark Skies is semi-lyrical, mixing personal narrative with arts commentary and research on constructions of identity, race, power, migration, and violence. The book follows the trajectory of a year of living in the southern Netherlands, watching the refugee crisis unfold across Europe, and feeling deeply the geographic proximity of the disaster. The two primary narrative threads running through the entire book are the experience of living in Europe-mixed with the narrative of Zwartjes' relationship with her wife, who is Russian-and the unfolding of both the refugee crisis and the uptick in terrorist acts in France, Greece, Austria, Germany, the Balkans, etc. As it moves through this story, the writer seeks to probe her own subjectivity, as a whiteAmerican, as a queer woman in a transcultural marriage, as a writer and a witness--