"Eleni Sikelianos is the vagabond traveler dreaming Sappho's words in the desolate lands of 'truthwar,' where only a 'house of consciousness' can gather 'language-states from scraps,' to reveal Poetry as 'a secret way of knowing,' to counter the fields of hatred now enveloping us."--Cecilia Vicuña"Eleni Sikelianos cares for her work in such a way entire generations are illuminated. Her poems aim at the mystery and hold it up with awe. 'They are fireflies. / What I am I cannot say.' Like only the best poets, Sikelianos leaves us changed from how we thought we knew our world."--CAConrad"As our knowledges are increasingly mediated by algorithm, Eleni Sikelianos's What I Knew defends the private knowledge of poetry, a house that does not relinquish itself to isolationism, but is instead incessantly capacious, absolutely in its time and sick of it. There is a huge web of 'in's here--the house and the poem, the body and the daughter, Colorado and Casablanca, Cleveland and Guantanamo--responding to the tradition of the American epic and enlarging its 'we' transnationally.
'In this house,' Sikelianos writes, 'we try to speak the words of it / The disasters touching each of us.' Sikelianos beautifully reminds us what of us we must guard against taming, against surveillance. Political, felicitous, to read What I Knew is to read a subversive message delivered, in Sikelianos's solicitous hands, in one of our last 'uncorruptable' forms of speech. Just gorgeous."--Solmaz Sharif"All things speak in Eleni's project - all things know and all things dissolve into each other through the undulations of unknowable being that just happens to know you and your interconnections with the 'capito-human-desire landscape.' Somehow Eleni's 'yogini' script is able to see and make an incision into the stuff of our body-planet-cosmos, the 'big-loco-shining-night,' and 'accordion out the world.' These multi-form and multi-vocal texts of quarked holes, of reversed see-thru lives, of 'serpent communications,' call us out, to unlock ourselves from our 'religio-military-citadel.' Will we? This text is one-of-a-kind, a 'wet psyche' writing itself in vision-meters, jagged, fearless new languages, and thought-arrangements for us to enter and un-peel the incredible life-life-is.
"--Juan Felipe Herrera"Sikelianos's poems collect the world and then disassemble it. They prove her to be one of our most free-thinking and innovative poets, whose evolving work continually challenges the boundaries of her art while retaining an essential lyricism."--Boston Review"Sikelianos asks; a big question for herself, for her poetry (so indebted to nature), and for all creatures still seeking happiness."--Publishers Weekly "Through artifacts--lists of songs, newspaper clippings, photographs, film posters, staged interviews, poems--the poet Sikelianos assembles a textual chimera that keeps sliding through her fingers."--Jenny Hendrix, The Believer.