Search results for ""Author Eleni Sikelianos""

"Unforgettable." --Michael Ondaatje These rhythmic poems negotiate the collisions between past, present, and future--and outline a universal mythology of the self. Exploring the overlapping arrangements of time and memory, life and death, Sikelianos skillfully draws lines from everyday minutiae towards an interior world where we are "carrying our own living ghost inside." "Comes to me" the future comes to me with a horrifying screech then it comes to me softly like a weeping cloud and it comes to me like a fish, glass-eyed, flopping and it comes to erotically meanly& sharp it comes to me cashed out rolling electronically in my future life I was a cowboy, killed in a bar fight a flamingo in snow Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, including The California Poem, a Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year. She directs the University of Denver's Creative Writing program.

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Praise for Eleni Sikelianos: Library Journal Best Books 2013: Poetry Electric as a lightning storm, wild as a first-growth forest, protean as fantasy's shape-shifters--that's Sikelianos's poetry, a real pleasure to read."--Library Journal Using text and images, moving spikily across the page and across ideas in ever-expanding loops, Make Yourself Happy is devoted to one of the oldest and most important human questions: how to live. Humanity, happiness, and the survival of the biosphere spin each section forward, species are wiped out, yet the poem endures. You walk into the sunlight to make yourself happy. This is the poem that will tell you how to live.

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Lauded by Michael Ondaatje as an “unforgettable” writer and praised by The Washington Post for her ability to capture “the subtlest shades of the emotional palette,” Eleni Sikelianos now charts the curvature of growth and time, encompassing the bewilderment and delight of a new parent, while mapping the shape of our troubled world. Observing that “what is alive in the body clock is also ticking,” her poems and sketches illustrate the infinite possibilities unfurling as minutes give shape to hours, the body gives shape to a child, and events give shape to history. A California native, longtime New Yorker, and world traveler, Eleni Sikelianos lives in Boulder and teaches at Denver University.

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What I Knew engages activities and knowledge that can’t be mined or verified by search engines or easily surveilled. Sourced from poetry’s ancient materials of dream, memory, story, and experience, What I Knew aims to create a site of resistance to, and refuge from, our current overflow of information and fact-checking, where private desires and whims cannot be commodified. It seeks alternative, personal forms of globalization rather than the public forms we know.

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Eleni Sikelianos, “a master of mixing genres” (Time Out New York), further bends time and space in Your Kingdom, an ode to our more-than-human animal origins. As she studies the wild roots of our past, present, and future, Sikelianos, one of our foremost practitioners of ecopoetic exploration, finds solace in the complexity of our natural lineage as we face the environmental precarity of the present.Our shoulders and hips were invented by salamanders. Hidden motives bind us to cuckoos and caterpillars. Our faces form biological maps while our organs trace the shapes of our animal ancestors. From the cellular to the celestial, Your Kingdom inquisitively and energetically investigates our notion of biological kingdoms, calling us to “let the body feel all its own evolution inside.”

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Cast as a dialogue among six interlocuters, this lyric blend of poetry and prose considers light from a variety of perspectives - philosophical, physical, ethical, and metaphorical.

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"… a highly developed range that's very beautiful."—Leslie Scalapino Zhang Er grasps for the spiritual through objects of the mundane, quietly detailing the wonder and desperation that courses through human lives. In these poems, the eye watches the eye so that no facet of our existence remains unexplored. "Zhang Er belongs to the generation beyond lament or anger over the hardship endured by Chinese intellectuals, from overthrown rebellion to construction, from confusion to clarity, from darkness to light (ambiguity to clarity). She walks out of suffering and uncertainty, discovers the loveliness, preciousness of life and self-respect . . ."—(New World Poetry Bimonthly) From the poem "Verses on Bird": The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying. From classical fugues to Romanticism, this effort produced Schubert. When storms attack, the nightjar’s cry Swells. The noble revolution will require great Sacrifice, yet do not ask me to capture this process on the black And white keys, nor to switch to another tone. I could not find two birds with identical pitch. With nothing to induce it, innocence makes me walk Into rushing water as if I were brave. Empty space is great, but nothing Repeats itself there. Whether I do Or whether I don’t; from each, the sum of the piano’s voice will rise. Not to be doubted: bird writes poem, one vowel at a time. Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1986. Her poetry, nonfiction and essays have appeared in publications throughout the world, and she is the author of multiple books in Chinese and in English translation. She has also participated in projects sponsored by the New York Council for the Arts and by the Minetta Brook Foundation.

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