The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead

"Eleni's language--body-language, breath, and babies' many minds behind--a poem that won't let you go til it's done with you, its sinuous whipping lines."
--Gary Snyder "Sikelianos, the great-granddaughter of a renowned Greek poet, continues her own explorations of the epic with this dazzling new macro-collage. The resulting lucid cacophony is close to what she described in her earlier work "The Book of Jon", 'enough pipe-dreams to fill up several countries, countries full of pipe-dreamers.' Hers is a voice, or voices, unlike anything in contemporary poetry."--John Ashbery "Sikleanos' gift has always been for place and the particular. In her extraordinary new collection she conjures a sympathetic magic for the quick and the dead. This mid-territory where language and disappearance are forever turning and returning is explored and surveyed in loving detail. These poems offer consolation for our American predicament here and now where 'the body picks up its shadow like a baby and carries it home.'"--Susan Howe "The poems present messages that need to be shared--and that the reader is drawn to try to understand--yet the narratives are not spoonfed . . . I highly recommend Eleni Sikelianos' "The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead.""--"Sit With Moi!" "Electric as a lightning storm, wild as a first-growth forest, protean as fantasy's shape-shifters--that's Sikelianos's poetry, a real pleasure to read."--"Library Journal" "Come, let us speak of shadows. The Loving Detail is full of them . . . indeed, much of The Loving Detail is about observing the things that shadows get up to when they take it in mind to walk abroad in the ordinary evenings."--"Oona Verse"