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Published in USA
Jun 2014
126 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
This is the tale of Melena, five times married, mother of three, burlesque dancer, and "the toughest, hardest-assed woman to ever eat wood and bite nails." Located in history and memory, her life cracks open questions of identity at the heart of an American immigrant woman's experience and becomes an argument that no existence is ever truly marginal.
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"Melena strikes a playful and sharp figure in her leopard print costume. Sikelianos never lets go of the fantasy of the image, but she also explores her grandmother's underlying grit. Fans of her previous work will be sure to enjoy Sikelianos's atypical memoir." - Publishers Weekly
"A wonderfully strange and inventive book by a professor and poet who combines various forms into an unclassifiable whole... This is writing and reading as adventure, where every page can bring a different sort of revelation." - Kirkus
"This experimental memoir - part scrapbook, essay and poem - tells the story of Melena, a burlesque dancer and mother whose experiences as an American immigrant woman encompass issues of identity and belonging." - Chicago Tribune's Printers Row
"[T]his hybrid work is simply sui generis, refreshingly unclassifiable. By the time I made it out to that rock shop in the desert, I began to feel like a detective in my own unexamined life." - Coldfront Magazine
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Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead and The California Poem, which was a Barnes & Noble Best of the Year, as well as a hybrid memoir,The Book of Jon. Sikelianos teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. A California native, longtime New Yorker, and world traveler, she now lives in Boulder with her husband, the novelist Laird Hunt, and their daughter, Eva Grace.
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"Berlin's new book is a marvel, filled with deeply touching stories about lives on the fringes."—NPR
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