Synopses & Reviews
With a seamless weave of letters, reminiscences, poems and journal entries, Sikelianos creates a loving portrait—and an unblinking indictment—of her father. Jon, a multitalented, eccentric visionary, emerges as a brilliant, charming, irresponsible, frustrating, and ultimately tragic hero.
This is a saga of the rise and fall of family lines—a tale marked by bohemia, Greek poets, intellectuals, drugs and homelessness. It is the story of eccentrics and survivors, the strength of personal vision and the nature of addiction, and what it does to families. An exquisitely rendered exploration of the harrowing and motivating forces of family, history, and individual choices.
Eleni Sikelianos’ previous books include Earliest Worlds and the National Poetry Series winner The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls. She lives in Boulder, CO.
Review
"Like the heroin high he describes, the Book of Jon is a cinematic memoir in which a ravaged and rackabones father 'beams, flashes and fluctuates' -- and squanders a family's Book of Hours. An artist of searching and restless intelligence, Eleni Sikelianos evokes road trips, pipe dreams, chemically induced disorder, thwarted tenderness and vanishing acts with charged particles of light. This is her most stunning achievement thus far." Rikki Ducornet, author of The Word Desire The pure products of America go crazy William Carlos Williams laments and one sees the starry-eyed mongrel male youth (the poets Dear Father Dear Jon Dear Pop) caught in a maelstrom of damning proclivity -- seductive inebriants, vicissitudes of visionary hippiedom gone awry, botched talent. Its a difficult America to ride. One wants the old invisible one of hobos and dreamers and moonshine. Given a personal drama which includes a fractured yet prodigious family and its impressive Greco-American lineage of creativemen and women, what might the modus operandi for transformation and survival consist of? What is the greater gnosis here? Eleni Sikelianoss BOOK OF JON is a bittersweet offering of imagination and love, as much about herself, the miraculous poet, as it is about the beloved , tragic father and their relationship. Anecdote, dreams, lore, lush description of landscapes transcend the grit and horror of this personal tale. This is one of the most affecting and revelatory memoirs I have ever read. I will go out and walk all night in the goddamned moonlight... says Jon. Anne Waldman
Review
Consistently wedding innovative technique with time-honored poetic tropes of light and dark, individual and cosmos, and self and other, this ambitious debut takes in a lot of influences but emerges singularly and beautifully.Publishers Weekly
Something crystalline, something about the enigma of human beginnings, some inexplicable pull toward the elemental phosphor, quark and carbons has her soaring, piping out songsabout the chemistry of color, the turbulent existence of currents and the gift of seeing how it all fits together under her greedy gaze.This handsomely designed collection will enchant because behind its self-professed gluttony for words,Earliest Worlds flaunts a sexy insouciance and an uproarious inventiveness underscoring the whole textual fabric as if shot through with brilliant threads of daring and mischief.
Detroit Metro Times
In formal and semantic terms, Sikelianoss work explores plenitude as an escape route from habit. Many recent books have gleefully collided tonal registers, levels of diction, and variant subject matter; Earliest Worlds exhibits, in an exhilarating way, the freedoms of this newest generation of American poets to use, to ignore, and to synthesize features that have typically divided various schoolsof poetry over the years. The book is full of postmodern collisions: epistles, scientific discourse, love poems, excerpts from Melville and Stephen Hawking, even Montaignesque essay.Sikelianoss postulations are radically linked to tradition even as they spin into rhizomatic new trajectories.
Rain Taxi
Review
"Eleni Sikelianos is no ordinary memoirist. . . . She is first and foremost a poet, and it's the precision and thoughtfulness of her language that draw us in. . . . Despite her father's flaws, or perhaps because of them, Sikelianos makes him an engrossing, unforgettable character."
The Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
A loving portrait and unblinking indictment of the author's father, Jon: a talented musician, a high school dropout, an autodidact descendent of Greek nobility, and, for much of his life, a drug addict. An eccentric visionary, he emerges as a brilliant, irresponsible, frustrating, and ultimately tragic figure. In 2001, after three years of homelessness on the streets of Albuquerque, he died in a motel room from an overdose.
Synopsis
Vivid and poignant evocation of a daughter's relationship with her enigmatic, inspiring, and deeply troubled father.
About the Author
Eleni Sikelianos is the winner of the 2002 National Poetry Series, a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, two Gertrude Stein Awards, and the James D. Phelan Award. She is the author of various poetry collections and her work has appeared in many magazines and journals. She is currently on the faculty of the Naropa Institute.