49:3/4 & 50:1 Summer 2004

ELENI SIKELIANOS

from The California Poem

The Summer 2004 triple issue (featuring the tribute to Edward Dorn) also included an excerpt from Eleni Sikelianos’s The California Poem. Though seeming to contrast sharply with Dorn’s tersely masculine outlaw stance, The California Poem pairs Sikelianos’s intuitive and nostalgic consideration of the Californian natural world with her own sense of heresy—the permissions, exceptions, and desires connecting the lines of an individual cartography. In her Spring 2006 review of the full-length volume (The California Poem, Coffee House Press, 2004), current CR editor Leila Wilson wrote that Sikelianos “wants to uncover memory, dream, and experience alongside documented history in order to reveal something fundamental about her territory, and ultimately, herself.” The author of the 2002 National Poetry Series-winning The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls (Green Integer Press), in addition to several books and chapbooks, Sikelianos teaches at Naropa and the University of Denver.

[KM, 2006]

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