Make Yourself Happy

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead and The California Poem, which was a Barnes & Noble Best of the Year, as well as hybrid memoirs, The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek). Sikelianos teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. A California native, longtime New Yorker, and world traveler, she now lives in Boulder with her husband, the novelist Laird Hunt, and their daughter, Eva Grace.

"In her latest collection, Sikelianos... employs her joy-demanding title as more than a refrain, cleverly letting it unfold as a humanist battle cry amid the earth's downfall."--Publishers Weekly "Slowly but surely... Sikelianos unravels the whole notion of happiness."--Vertigo "In [Eleni's] most recent book, Make Yourself Happy, lines lengthen and collapse; drawings and photographs punctuate each spiraling section; and pages ask to be cut out, folded, and reborn in three dimensions. Yes, this book will make you happy?--?it will also make you invigorated, curious, thoughtful, and astonished."--The Ribbon, interview "In Make Yourself Happy, Eleni Sikelianos evinces a neuro-psychological state counter to the miswrought biology that has haunted the Occident since the dawn of Roman times. These poems open the neurology to its whole participation in the psycho-physical field and are not unlike the seminal amplification of indigenous culture, where the language of the body simultaneously circulates with living metastates. These poems organically form as environmental respiration that only the poet can approach in the latter days of this techno-hypercritical epoch."--Will Alexander "This poem is addressed to you. You want to be happy, don't you? In deceptively simple sentences, it tells you how to 'make yourself happy.' You might aspirate on honey, for instance. Play connect the dots and the extinct animals pop out. Did you kill them all to make yourself happy? Here you will bask in the syllabic glow of the 'shirred / aggregates / mineral iridium / irresidue.' This book is your invitation to the post-human pool party of the future."--Rae Armantrout "With her native Greek wisdom and her American exuberance, Eleni takes us into the different layers which make our daily lives, perceptions, thoughts ... as they take form, and thanks to her become an initiatique, even archeological, journey. Besides the pleasure we feel, we see here a moral endeavor, an invitation to make ourselves happy. Her journey finds its energy in her perfect ear for language and immense generosity of heart. Her openness lets in the sinuosities and cracks of what we may well end up calling 'being,' in her great project of telling us, in these worst moments of actual history, to be (urgently) happy because we are ... happy. And let me share at least one epiphany: 'to graze in / winter in snow- / free meadows.'"--Etel Adnan