Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
To be homesick for the whole of California requires a vast imagination. Whitman in his way was always homesick for what lay ahead and behind him. And now Eleni, female on earth, takes on the grief-engorged plateau that lies between imagination and the already-known in this truly ambitious American poem. Itis Nature. Italso is a blur of remembered facts. Itis the haunt of these pages. The Female principle and product of California dreams it, as if I were the sea.Fanny Howe
Synopsis
Glorious, expansive, and urgent, this is the first significant epic poem of the new millennium.
Synopsis
Poetry. California, hedonistically beautiful and increasingly endangered , is the star of this book-lenth 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, Whitmatic 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.
About the Author
Eleni Sikelianos, the great-granddaughter of revered Greek poet, Angelos Sikelianos, is the author of the critically acclaimed debut book of poems Earliest Worlds and the National Poetry Series award-winning collection The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls. A native of California and long-time New Yorker, she has lived in Paris and Athens, hitchhiked through East and Central Africa, traveled extensively in Europe, and has spent time in Mexico, Hong Kong, Borneo, Singapore and Malaysia. Sikelianos lives in Boulder, Colorado.