Memory Rehearsal

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.

Praise for Memory Rehearsal:"The book opens with a cast list—Sappho, Io, Prometheus, Isadora Duncan, Hermes, Violence, Force, a scattering of family, the poet herself—and the it knots together archival fact, poetic imagining, myth, the whispers and chance encounters that piece us all together."—Nina MacLaughlin, New England Literary News "In Memory Rehearsal we follow Eleni Sikelianos down heart trails to Maine, to Paris, to Athens, to Delphi, traveling a blood dream of ancestral rhythms, feet pounding the drum of the earth, at the omphalos, the center of the world, in a valley above the sea, asking 'who will take care of the future if I give up on it?'"—Gary Lawless, Gulf of Maine Books, Brunswick, Maine"An extraordinarily beautiful and complex poet's feat of hyperthymesia, where superior autobiographical memory is transcendent and interwoven with passionately researched documentation. What is the desire that pushes the psyche, and this particular major poet, on this enormous and endless task of devotion, poetry, telepathy and love? Sikelianos's voyage is a spiritual quest to untangle a history that only she and only poetry can accomplish. It is a meditation on gender, place, and reclamation, a struggle for a whole vision and version for the writer of her own self and purpose. The genius of this pursuit is staggering. . . .The intricate weaving and array of image and language to get there leaves me breathless. There is nothing like it that I have seen."—Anne Waldman, author of Mesopotopia"Singing at her loom like the sorceress Circe, Eleni Sikelianos weaves a spellbinding work that claims the living ghost of her poetic lineage, flowing full of her own spirit and reaching back to its source in her mythical great-grandmother, Eva Palmer Sikelianos, and the radical revival of the Delphic festivals of 1927-30. With a warp of language and a weft of memory, myth, human, animal, image, and history, this book is a magnificent, shimmering garment: polyphonic, sensorial, a sacred stitching of personal inheritance and historic past in a fiercely contemporary act."—Phoebe Giannisi, author of Chimera"You are turning this book in your hands, which is the first piece of good news! I cannot get enough of Eleni Sikelianos, and I could not stop reading these pages once I started! She is the poet who does not hesitate, pulling the dead forward for a closer look and conversation, 'Our ancestors have no need of all this instrumentation, yet I am struggling to hear.' Through her discovery, we question the world we thought we knew, recalibrating our love for the living!"—CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return"This remarkable story, told in fragments of prose and poetry and laced with fascinating images . . . Memory Rehearsal is Sikelianos's charming, fascinating, and melancholy record . . ."—Diane Josefowicz, The Providence Eye"Making her first trip to her ancestral homeland, Eleni slowly reveals an unconventional family history in an intriguing blend of poetry, prose, performance texts, fiction, and nonfiction accompanied by archival and family photographs."—June Sawyers, Booklist