-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
by Eleni Sikelianos
A genre-busting encounter between a poet and her ancestral past documenting a startling intersection of queer history, ancient theater, utopian visions, and modern poetry.
In 1901, Eva Palmer abandoned her life as a privileged New York socialite, moving to Paris with her lover, the writer, and salonist, Natalie Barney. The two Americans became the center of a wild tangle of lesbian love affairs and backyard performances based in an intentional reimagining of Sappho's work and life. This hotbed of early European modernism saw in the ancient past the possibility for sexual and artistic emancipation, especially for lesbian women.
A chance encounter led Eva to Greece, where she married Angelos Sikelianos, a visionary poet who would become a Greek national hero. Together, they decided to stage a revival of the ancient Delphic festivals, convinced that it would open a path to world peace. By the end of two festivals, their meticulous reproductions had managed to change the course of modern Greek cultural history, even as their marriage dissolved. Eva returned to the U.S. and spent the next decades of her life in debt, but she never stopped pursuing her vision, convinced of the revolution of consciousness these art festivals could bring about.
Celebrated American poet Eleni Sikelianos grew up knowing little of her illustrious ancestors, and it was not until the age of 20, on her first trip to Greece, that she encountered the breadth of their legacy. In Memory Rehearsal, Sikelianos unearths the story of her pioneering ancestor trying to make a place for herself, in a text that shifts between prose, poetry, imaginary performance texts, fiction, and nonfiction, with archival and family photographs.
This is the third book in a trilogy of hybrid memoirs in which Sikelianos reckons with a family shaped by mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. Grappling with knots of personal and broader histories, she performs a powerful act of recovery, re-situating herself by claiming her lineage.
"A moving family memoir and a triumph of cultural archaeology." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"An extraordinarily beautiful and complex poet's feat of hyperthymesia, where superior autobiographical memory is transcendent and interwoven with passionately researched documentation. What is the desire that pushes the psyche, and this particular major poet, on this enormous and endless task of devotion, poetry, telepathy and love? Sikelianos's voyage is a spiritual quest to untangle a history that only she and only poetry can accomplish. It is a meditation on gender, place, and reclamation, a struggle for a whole vision and version for the writer of her own self and purpose. The genius of this pursuit is staggering...The intricate weaving and array of image and language to get there leaves me breathless. There is nothing like it that I have seen." —Anne Waldman, author of Mesopotopia
"Singing at her loom like the sorceress Circe, Eleni Sikelianos weaves a spellbinding work that claims the living ghost of her poetic lineage, flowing full of her own spirit and reaching back to its source in her mythical great-grandmother, Eva Palmer Sikelianos, and the radical revival of the Delphic festivals of 1927-30. With a warp of language and a weft of memory, myth, human, animal, image, and history, this book is a magnificent, shimmering garment: polyphonic, sensorial, a sacred stitching of personal inheritance and historic past in a fiercely contemporary act." —Phoebe Giannisi, author of Chimera
This information about Memory Rehearsal was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne'er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and two unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine. Among other honors, she has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Artists fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in nonfiction. She grew up in Goleta, California, and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
If you liked Memory Rehearsal, try these:
Our wisdom comes from our experience, and our experience comes from our foolishness
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
