Eleni Sikelianos, Your Kingdom

 

Our cells recall ancient chemical joys and traumas, pre-life, while our limbs remember salamanders. A poem remembers our past in language and posits a future in the simplest sense, like a to-do note, hoping that it will be seen at some point hence and remind us of something worth knowing, feeling. It is an ecosystem that, like any functioning system, should deal with its own shit.

 

If we let phyla be taken over by its bedmate and homonym, phylla (leaves, petals, sprouts, sheaves, sheets of paper), we clear a silent space where we are all bound together and leafing from the same roots. If we take it further, to its homonymic neighbor, philo, we fall into love, with all our living friends, and with the dead left in traces

                                    under oceans and in rivers and lake beds

The latest from Providence, Rhode Island-based poet Eleni Sikelianos is Your Kingdom (Minneapolis MI: Coffee House Press, 2023), a collection that follows nearly a dozen of her published books-to-date, including You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) (Coffee House Press, 2014) [see my review of such here], Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], Make Yourself Happy (Coffee House Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and What I Knew (Brooklyn NY: Nightboat Books, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Offering “an ode to our more-than-human animal origins,” Your Kingdom works through a strata of language and layering, blending genres and perspectives both human and animal, and into the geologic. “The face like a magnet draws to itself / animal parts,” she writes, to open the poem “In the Great Hall of Bones,” “rabbit paw / veal gut / pig light // to the eye & the skin & the teeth & the tongue / to echo the chaos of mouth // more crumpled mammal than / daylight [.]” A master of holding the smallest of moments within such a lyric expanse, Sikelianos articulates a humanity intricately and impossibly connected to all other life on the planet, citing evolutionary and contemporary connections that can’t be denied or dismissed, especially if we are all, somehow, to survive ecological disaster. “you are not the only you to invent orchestration,” she writes, as part of the title poem-section, “all the syntax in mouse song sounding out some- / where between bird-syllable and your thumb scrubbing a glass clean // as you hum in the kitchen / and wipe the dishes [.]”

Composed across seven sections set as lyric clusters or long poems—“First of All,” “In the Museum of Contemporary Anatomy,” “Your Kingdom,” “Polishing the Animal Mirror,” “Bestiaries on the Lamb,” “All the Living Living Together (Reevolutionize)” and “Deevolutionize”—Your Kingdom is an open and expansive book-length lyric, and her approach and tone through subject is comparable to works by Canadian poets Don McKay or Adam Dickinson, writing an engagement with science and natural histories, although wildly different in lyric structure. “In the strata of the rock is recorded,” she writes, as part of the expansive title poem-section, “some of your earlier story through some scraps of it / are lost, you read it / in ocean silt: it would have been better / to go hermaphroditic or / parthenogenetic but you adapt / to the instability of two-sexed / reproduction with / glee, warm-blooded and arisen / from the loving filament [.]”