Also in this Issue
- Bolinas Junction Two former lovers and six Minnesota writers unite in a serial short story (Cover Story)
- A Confederacy of Sleaze From contract killing to mainlining Mormon blood, James Ellroy depicts the most lurid of American nightmares (Books)
- Divine Hammer In his sprawling new novel, John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead chips away at the legends of the 20th Century (Books)
- Let Them Read Cake A new brand of travel writer savors foie gras, catnaps, and voluptuous idle living for the rest of us (Books)
- An Algerian Childhood: A Collection of Autobiographical Narratives (Books Roundup)
- Louise Erdrich: The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (Books Roundup)
- Jessica Treadway: And Give You Peace (Books Roundup)
- More articles from this issue...
More Books Roundup Articles
- Julián Ríos: Monstruary (Apr 18, 2001)
- Robert M. Sapolsky: A Primate's Memoir (Apr 18, 2001)
- Edward Carey: Observatory Mansions (Apr 18, 2001)
- Allegra Goodman: Paradise Park (Apr 18, 2001)
- Don DeLillo: The Body Artist (Mar 14, 2001)
- Helen Dunmore: A Spell of Winter (Mar 14, 2001)
- John Le Carré: The Constant Gardener (Feb 7, 2001)
- Kathleen Cambor: In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden (Feb 7, 2001)
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Eleni Sikelianos: Earliest Worlds
Earliest Worlds
Coffee House Press
"THIS (MY) BRAIN-TRUCK, a knot of numbered wasps," announces New York poet Eleni Sikelianos in her new book Earliest Worlds, and indeed these poems are diesel-powered swarms of metaphor and experimentation. Risking as much movement as they can bear (or is that bare?) without collapsing from g-force stress, the poems speed through disparate voices--"[a]ll the voices the city winds up," as the opening piece puts it. Everyone and everything can speak here, even the language itself (that is, phrases conversing with clauses), creating a world whose grammar is often bizarre and jarring.
More than just a vanguard poet, however, Sikelianos nicely avoids affectation and flat abstraction, often defying her own radical impulses. Like Stein and Beckett, she makes wild wordplay a way of life but allows some prosaic ease to flesh out her writing's tense poetic musculature.
Earliest Worlds actually contains two collections, Blue Guide and Of Sun, of History, of Seeing, and both flirt with prose in different ways. The former shuffles untitled prose-poems into the deck of sprawling, syncopated verse. The latter integrates these elements even further, moving within poems from longer, talkier lines to shorter, breathier ones. Of Sun also categorizes each piece, usually as a kind of discursive writing. Of 65 total, Sikelianos calls 31 of them "Essay," 6 "Histories," 4 "Artifact," 1 "Travelogue," and so on.
Sound dry? Not to worry: Earliest Worlds knows how to juice things up with comedy and sex. Call me shallow, but among my favorite moments are ones like this ending to an "Epistle": "Before/I met him I never thought about butt cracks, this/is my testimony. I now know he needs a quarter so he can hide it/in there, along with the American movies."
Perhaps a more pervasive charm is the author's obsession with scientific observation and jargon. Titles like "Study: How the Palate Bones in situ Resemble the Letter L (the floor of the orbit)" echo Marianne Moore's reverence for purely physical phenomena, which lends to both poets a kind of innocent 19th-century empiricism to ground their modern skepticism. It may be best to approach the strange intricacies of Earliest Worlds with a similar willingness to simply examine particulars (words, images, etc.) before drawing theoretical conclusions. Like aspiring biologists with our first microscopes, we may discover something amazing in there.
About Steve Healey
From the Archive
- Controlled Chaos Davu Seru and Gus Lucky's Unum series liberate jazz from the burden of expectations (Bringing It All Back Home - Mar 21, 2001)
- Paul Celan: Glottal Stop: 101 Poems, Threadsuns (Books Roundup - Oct 4, 2000)
- David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day (Books Roundup - Jun 14, 2000)
- Sarah Vowell: Take the Cannoli: Stories From the New World (Books Roundup - May 10, 2000)
- Jeffrey Little: The Hotel Sterno (Books Roundup - Apr 5, 2000)
- Simic's Simulacra (Books - Jan 12, 2000)
- Life Sentences Teaching Minnesota's student prisoners reveals the power of the pen (Cover Story - Jul 7, 1999)
- JOHN BERRYMAN The dreamer wakes (Scrawl Feature Story - Sep 9, 1998)
- More articles from the Steve Healey Archive...
