Aστυνομία Nοσοκομείο

Eleni Sikelianos

I keep confusing words, callingpolicemen hospitals,mayors townhalls.I mistook Corinthian Power Plantfor an ancient palace,     deep harborfor dream. Then I remembered languageis a lingering we keep hoping will drawup exigence like water     from a well, metaldust toward magnetite. Like this: in Lefkada, the old woman told me a storyas we walked by her village’s tongued     harbor. In winter the waves sometimes             lap right up into the streets, and when she was a child a child     was taken that way while his sister played and the motherwas out working the fields. When the mother came home the daughter saidDon’t bother looking for Kosma, a wave     ate him. How astounding then the accuracyof language and wave.                                                                    Sometimes it licks clean, licksthe pot clean.

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Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, Eleni Sikelianos’ work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages. Your Kingdom (Winter 2023) is her tenth book of poetry, riding alongside two memoir-verse-image-novels. For more about her work, look here: https://www.elenisikelianos.com/about.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

“This is a book of hearts. . . . In a time of ecological doom, there is gorgeous comfort—if only momentary—in Sikelianos’s deep histories and epic sensibility.”
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Poetry Foundation

“I am utterly awed by Eleni Sikelianos’s Your Kingdom. These poems spread their mammoth wings across a singing, rhythmic soundscape of language and into a layered timescape of evolution, wherein ‘each you is a metaphor for us,’ and us = human, plant, animal, earth / land / its waters, and even the stars as relatives. This is a celebration of our forever-connectivity, our collective beauty, strangeness, messiness, vibrant color, morphing, and seemingly infinite names. Thank you, Eleni, for this book—inside which I have never felt more present in the story of this world.”
—Layli Long Soldier

“A sound of two black holes on a collision course excites the scene of writing for Eleni Sikelianos in these poems made to luminesce in expansive multicellular reach and from the great intimacies of our animal kin and ken. Your Kingdom proliferates, whether by symbiosis or descent, whether by variation or ‘traces of this ravaging,’ into a visionary horizon beyond human selfhood—’chimera, cobbled / together from bits of genetic trash’—when at last we face the mirror of species relation. Sikelianos seeks first the chemical kisses of the cosmos to reanimate the pieces of us Darwin called the ‘wreck of ancient life.’ The outcome is a poetry of origin-affinity and light, a language of life forms thronging a ‘paradise / before we / killed or / breathed.’”
—Roberto Tejada

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