"Father's Day, I was in Santa Barbara visiting my daughter. We got sandwiches on lower State Street at the Greek Deli, which, along with Joe's Bar (one of the places I used to look for my old man), I told my daughter that was about all that was left from the 60s and 70s when lower State was Santa Barbara's skid row, and her grandpa lived in the YMCA in that's now a parking lot across from the Greyhound Depot. I could see the more I went on about it, anyway, the distant past held little interest on a day when the sunny boulevard was full of tourists and students shopping boutiques, hopping from sports-bar to dining on tapas in fountained patios. I shut up about her grandfather (who everyone else recalls only, when they bother, as the most essentially alcoholic of men), unable to shake his ghost in parking lots and single occupancy furnished rooms that no longer exist.I read this book dutifully, thinking, 'Okay, I'll do my duty - but we've lived this story, so do we have to read about it, too?' My guess is yes. We haven't heard the end of it yet, and we haven't heard about it in this way before. The untold stories, post-mortem dreams and oblique inferences Sikelianos composes for The Book of Jon cast smoky shadows of hope in the pungent colors of lived experience. Instead of another regurgitated tell-all memoir in the genre as currently marketed, instead of detailing in conventional melodramatic or operatic naturalism the body blows causing the wind to be knocked out of all the childhoods under these kind of fathers, Sikelianos structures The Book of Jon tellingly and evocatively through elision and inference juxtaposed with a poet's snapshot-apt observation.

Someone close to me (who's back in rehab again at the moment) once yelled at me, 'Never, ever write anything about me! My problems are not the subjects of your poems!' And Sikelianos's The Book of Jon isn't playing back her father's self-destruction for dramatic effect, for an evening's entertainment. She's not selling her own damage for the sake of authenticity in the market for reminiscences. Instead, with hard looks and casual bluntness, she's made a book of beaded moments that blesses both father and daughter even-handedly. The Book of Jon honors that difficult duty.