Eleni Sikelianos

A genre-busting encounter between a poet and her ancestral past documenting a startling intersection of queer history, ancient theater, utopian visions, and modern poetry. In 1901, Eva Palmer abandoned her life as a privileged New York socialite, moving to Paris with her lover, the writer, photographer and salonist, Natalie Barney. The two Americans became the center of a wild tangle of lesbian love affairs and backyard performances based in an intentional reimagining of Sappho's work and life. This hotbed of early European modernism saw in the ancient past the possibility for sexual and artistic emancipation, especially for lesbian women. A chance encounter led Eva to Greece, where she married Angelos Sikelianos, a visionary poet who would become a Greek national hero. Together, they decided to stage a revival of the ancient Delphic festivals, convinced that it would open a path to world peace. By the end of two festivals, their meticulous reproductions had managed to change the course of modern Greek cultural history, even as their marriage dissolved. Eva returned to the U.S. and spent the next decades of her life in debt and eventually homeless, but she never stopped pursuing her vision, convinced of the revolution of consciousness these art festivals could bring about. Celebrated American poet Eleni Sikelianos grew up knowing little of her illustrious ancestors, and it was not until the age of 20, on her first trip to Greece, that she encountered the breadth of their legacy. In Memory Rehearsal, Sikelianos unearths the story of her pioneering ancestor trying to make a place for herself, in a text that shifts between prose, poetry, imaginary performance texts, fiction, and nonfiction, with archival and family photographs. This is the third book in a trilogy of hybrid memoirs in which Sikelianos reckons with a family shaped by mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. Grappling with knots of personal and broader histories, she performs a powerful act of recovery, re-situating herself by claiming her lineage.

In this poignant account of a classmate's suicide, the acclaimed Moroccan author gives both a biting critique of small-town bigotry in the 1960s and a moving tribute to the fleeting beauty of adolescence. In Settat in the 1960s, when it was still a tiny village, a young man leapt to his death in front of his stunned class and their teacher, left holding a brief, devastating suicide note. Among the students was Mohamed Leftah. Haunted by the uncommon grace of that desperate act, and the tragic image of his body lying in the courtyard, Leftah penned this chronicle of life at the time, marked by repressed desire and shame. A fiery yet thoughtful meditation on taboo acts--homosexuality, adultery, suicide--and the hypocrisy and cruelty often found in those who judge them, Endless Fall also offers a fascinating window into the mind of the seminal writer.

Eleni Sikelianos, “a master of mixing genres” (Time Out New York), further bends time and space in Your Kingdom, an ode to our more-than-human animal origins. As she studies the wild roots of our past, present, and future, Sikelianos, one of our foremost practitioners of ecopoetic exploration, finds solace in the complexity of our natural lineage as we face the environmental precarity of the present.Our shoulders and hips were invented by salamanders. Hidden motives bind us to cuckoos and caterpillars. Our faces form biological maps while our organs trace the shapes of our animal ancestors. From the cellular to the celestial, Your Kingdom inquisitively and energetically investigates our notion of biological kingdoms, calling us to “let the body feel all its own evolution inside.”

What I Knew engages activities and knowledge that can’t be mined or verified by search engines or easily surveilled. Sourced from poetry’s ancient materials of dream, memory, story, and experience, What I Knew aims to create a site of resistance to, and refuge from, our current overflow of information and fact-checking, where private desires and whims cannot be commodified. It seeks alternative, personal forms of globalization rather than the public forms we know.

Praise for Eleni Sikelianos: Library Journal Best Books 2013: Poetry Electric as a lightning storm, wild as a first-growth forest, protean as fantasy's shape-shifters--that's Sikelianos's poetry, a real pleasure to read."--Library Journal Using text and images, moving spikily across the page and across ideas in ever-expanding loops, Make Yourself Happy is devoted to one of the oldest and most important human questions: how to live. Humanity, happiness, and the survival of the biosphere spin each section forward, species are wiped out, yet the poem endures. You walk into the sunlight to make yourself happy. This is the poem that will tell you how to live.

This is the tale of Melena, five times married, mother of three, burlesque dancer, and "the toughest, hardest-assed woman to ever eat wood and bite nails." Located in history and memory, her life cracks open questions of identity at the heart of an American immigrant woman's experience and becomes an argument that no existence is ever truly marginal. Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead, as well as a hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon. Sikelianos directs the creative writing program at the University of Denver.

"Unforgettable." --Michael Ondaatje These rhythmic poems negotiate the collisions between past, present, and future--and outline a universal mythology of the self. Exploring the overlapping arrangements of time and memory, life and death, Sikelianos skillfully draws lines from everyday minutiae towards an interior world where we are "carrying our own living ghost inside." "Comes to me" the future comes to me with a horrifying screech then it comes to me softly like a weeping cloud and it comes to me like a fish, glass-eyed, flopping and it comes to erotically meanly& sharp it comes to me cashed out rolling electronically in my future life I was a cowboy, killed in a bar fight a flamingo in snow Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, including The California Poem, a Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year. She directs the University of Denver's Creative Writing program.

Lauded by Michael Ondaatje as an "unforgettable" writer and praised by The Washington Post for her ability to capture "the subtlest shades of the emotional palette," Eleni Sikelianos now charts the curvature of growth and time, encompassing the bewilderment and delight of a new parent, while mapping the shape of our troubled world. Observing that "what is alive in the body clock is also ticking," her poems and sketches illustrate the infinite possibilities unfurling as minutes give shape to hours, the body gives shape to a child, and events give shape to history.A California native, longtime New Yorker, and world traveler, Eleni Sikelianos lives in Boulder and teaches at Denver University.

California, hedonistically beautiful and increasingly endangered, is the star of this book-length poem that flies through time, memory, science, history, and imagination, mirroring the topography of the Golden State’s landscape and the history of its diverse cultures. Alternating between grand, Whitmanic tone and scope, Dickinsonian minute detail, Beat rhythms, New York School wit and Objectivist sensibility, this epic poem engages traditional lyricism with a breathtaking contemporary style and graceful urgency. A native of California, Eleni Sikelianos has lived in New York City, Paris and Athens. She is the author of the poetry collection, Earliest Worlds, the memoir, Book of Jon (forthcoming from City Lights), and the National Poetry Series award-winning collection The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls.

This impressive debut of a major new voice in poetry begins with Blue Guide, a poem cycle of meditations on light and dark, probing the opposing/complementary nature of these universal principles and their manifestation through words. In Of Sun, Of History, Of Seeing, the oracular power of language fuels the journey between constellations shimmering above and the mind shimmering in response below, between phenomenology and phenomena.The author of five chapbooks, Eleni Sikelianos has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing. Her work has appeared in Grand Street, Chicago Review, and Sulfur. She lives in New York.Blue GuideContents[It is not enough that], 15 Matter has been Blown off the Surface, 16 The Stone I was Bothering, 17 [Dear Flaubert], 19 The Most Beautiful Theorems, 20 Everyone in the Country's got a Clubfoot, 22 [As a child], 23 Chapters: of I Define the Darkness Correct, 24 [Again, several years passed], 36 Book of Tributes: Cosmorama, 37 Lights, 38 [Fresh from the latitudes], 39 The Typical Hand, 40 [This, (my) brain-truck], 42 [Most of my life], 43 Thus, Speak the Chromograph, 44 [Polar citadel], 47 City between cycles of light, 48 [Now the bells have begun], 50 [I always took shadow for shelter], 51 [The devil was known for], 52 Worn like a corsage, 53 O quanta qualia suntilla sabbatta, 55 [Here is a story], 56 [You can be King of the Corners], 57 The brambles of cavalry (Quamash), 58 The Secret Life of J.K. Huysmans / parataxis, 62 [I will soon make my animal tears], 63 Chapters: Touching the Original Matter, 64 Campo santo, , 73 [Someone is sewing next to me], 74 The decameron, 75 Of the True Human Fold, 77 [They are chasing me home again], 78 "The birds are at their highest thoughts of leaving", 79 [Here we are on the place St. Sulpice], 80 The well-tempered clavicle, 81 [When the things was a?re], 82 The river's which river's why, 83 [As a result, some astronomers], 85 Under