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 Guide
Contents
[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
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Hi, I'm Eleni Sikelianos
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.
