Your Kingdom

REVIEWS

“Sikelianos’s classic style always shows that she is the master of the line, especially the enjambed line, and she is able to write adeptly about this moving toward death that is hidden from her reader.” —VIDA

“This ecopoetic collection considers humanity’s animal beginnings and imagines an ancestral line of existence and future possibilities for the ecosystem.” —Publishers Weekly

PRAISE

“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