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From the Contemporary Poetry Series #1
Eleni Sikelianos is a poet who dynamically composes the flexibly potent philosophical nuance of the experiment. It is here that sound and image and idea work at the level of a grain of silica, or cell. She tells us “It’s important to keep the borders permeable, [between genres] so that poetry remains in conversation with a world.”
— womens quarterly conversation
Eleni Sikelianos
Eleni Sikelianos, a native of California, is the author of two hybrid memoirs and eight books of poetry. As a translator, she has published Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges on Light and Sabine Macher’s Read More
Praise for The Book of Tendons
These taut beautiful poems are full of curious resonances that travel like physical memory. The past and the future run through the body of this work like streams flowing mysteriously through words or rivers “slipping between atoms.” In the process the ungovernable darkness of language pours through.
— Peter Gizzi
Form allows us to re-enliven language and what it carries — story, emotion, bewilderment, flux, etc. It is the psychic shape to the medium (language) that might otherwise carry any old thing along. I mean one might at times want language or a poem to carry any old thing along, but one of the roles form performs is to sharpen the psychic intention and reception. By “intention” I don’t mean to say that the writer will know what she “wants to say,” but that she will find a way to carry something across, just as a blue rectangle on a page is carried into the mind more readily than a blank page.
— Eleni Sikelianos, womens quarterly conversation