Description: "One of our foremost practitioners of ecopoetic exploration, Eleni Sikelianos, bends time and space in this ode to our animal origins. From the cellular to celestial, Your Kingdom is an inquisitive and energetic call to "let the body feel all its own evolution inside." Our limbs grew from the shoulders of salamanders. Hidden motives bind us to cuckoos and caterpillars. Our faces form biological maps while our organs trace the shapes of our animal ancestors. As she studies the wild roots of our past, present, and future, Sikelianos forms a poetic ecosystem, delighting in the complexity of our natural lineage in the face of environmental precarity. With wonder and verve, Your Kingdom reconnects us through language to our deeply animal origins-to the cellular essence from which all life emerged"--
Review Quotes: Praise for Your Kingdom
"This is a book of hearts. . . . In a time of ecological doom, there is gorgeous comfort--if only momentary--in Sikelianos's deep histories and epic sensibility." --Rebecca Morgan Frank, Poetry Foundation "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