Memory Rehearsal

Praise for Memory Rehearsal:

“An extraordinarily beautiful and complex poet’s feat of hyperthymesia, where superior autobiographical memory is transcendent and interwoven with passionately researched documentation. What is the desire that pushes the psyche, and this particular major poet, on this enormous and endless task of devotion, poetry, telepathy and love? Sikelianos’s voyage is a spiritual quest to untangle a history that only she and only poetry can accomplish. It is a meditation on gender, place, and reclamation, a struggle for a whole vision and version for the writer of her own self and purpose. The genius of this pursuit is staggering… .The intricate weaving and array of image and language to get there leaves me breathless. There is nothing like it that I have seen.“—Anne Waldman, author of Mesopotopia

“Singing at her loom like the sorceress Circe, Eleni Sikelianos weaves a spellbinding work that claims the living ghost of her poetic lineage, flowing full of her own spirit and reaching back to its source in her mythical great-grandmother, Eva Palmer Sikelianos, and the radical revival of the Delphic festivals of 1927-30. With a warp of language and a weft of memory, myth, human, animal, image, and history, this book is a magnificent, shimmering garment: polyphonic, sensorial, a sacred stitching of personal inheritance and historic past in a fiercely contemporary act.“—Phoebe Giannisi, author of Chimera

“You are turning this book in your hands, which is the first piece of good news! I cannot get enough of Eleni Sikelianos, and I could not stop reading these pages once I started! She is the poet who does not hesitate, pulling the dead forward for a closer look and conversation, ‘Our ancestors have no need of all this instrumentation, yet I am struggling to hear.’ Through her discovery, we question the world we thought we knew, recalibrating our love for the living!“—CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

Praise for You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek):

“No matter how one summarizes its scope or achievement, You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) will surpass it, with its too much mother-static, its fundamental wildness.“—Maggie Nelson“This is writing and reading as adventure, where every page can bring a different sort of revelation.“—Kirkus, starred review“With her latest book, Eleni Sikelianos sashays with the essay, teasing us with the literary device’s exotic form.“—Los Angeles Review of Books“Sikelianos’ portrait includes poems, unusual typography, and photographs that would not look out of place in a W. G. Sebald novel.“—Booklist“Through artifacts—lists of songs, newspaper clippings, photographs, film posters, staged interviews, poems—the poet Sikelianos assembles a textual chimera that keeps sliding through her fingers.“—The Believer

Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos. Among other honors, she has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Artists fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in nonfiction. She grew up in Goleta, California, and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.