Details

ISBN-10: 0872864367
ISBN-13: 9780872864368
Publisher: City Lights Books
Publish Date: 10/01/2004
Dimensions: 6.98" L, 4.62" W, 0.39" H

Published by City Lights

The Book of Jon

Paperback

Price: Original price was: $14.95.Current price is: $10.47.

Overview

Vivid and poignant evocation of a daughter’s relationship with her enigmatic, inspiring, and deeply troubled father.

  • Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne'er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and two unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine. 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.

     

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Reviews

"In the past century, poetic collage has gone from revolutionary composition method to creative-writing exercise, but it has lost none of its force ... The contemporary collage poem in particular has proved itself to be a remarkably flexible form, capable of containing many matters and arguments and of availing itself readily of reflexivity and meta-collage ... The Book of Jon is beautifully and scrupulously written, and like many of the grand collages of the past century, it acknowledges that human experience is by definition partial, fragmentary, and riddled with obfuscations, as is the art that most faithfully reflects it."–Susan M. Schultz, The Boston 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 draws us in. In it she explores her troubled love for her father in a series of short chapters that incorporate observations, rants, dreams, letters, a family tree, photographs, poetry."–Andrew Ervin, The Washington Post

"The Book of Jon is a poem in the form of a memoir, a tragedy in the form of gradual revelation, a tale in the form of a nightmare from which you are not allowed to wake. It is a book of rare beauty, an elegy comprised of affirmation, illustration, divination, and pure loss."–Laura Wright, The American Book Review

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Details

ISBN-10: 0872864367
ISBN-13: 9780872864368
Publisher: City Lights Books
Publish Date: 10/01/2004
Dimensions: 6.98" L, 4.62" W, 0.39" H
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