| The
California Poem
Reviews
Ron Silliman, Silliman’s Blog:
“The California Poem is to the golden state in more than a few ways what Maximus is to Gloucester.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review:
“A remarkable poem of near-Homeric proportion and ambition . . . elaborately ornamented with allusions to high culture and pop culture, Virgil and Evel Knievel, Dante and Jayne Mansfield, the Odyssey and Marlon Brando’s movie ‘One-Eyed Jacks.’ . . . [A] perfectly accurate and authentic expression of the place [Sikelianos] calls, appropriately enough, ‘my hedon eden.’”
Vox:
“The first great environmental poem of the 21st century.”
Santa Cruz Sentinel:
“Part nostalgia, part California dream, part natural history, Sikelianos’ large-scale heroic poem is a wild place, perfectly exposed.”
Time Out Chicago:
“The California Poem shifts between telling stories of Californians and more abstract contemplations of the state’s unique mindset. It’s lyrical, funny, and seems primed for reading aloud.”
Buffalo ArtVoice:
“Sprawling, ambitious, artfully messy . . . a triumph.”
Chicago Review:
“Sikelianos’s California is mysterious, abundant, pure, wild, unpredictable, and pleasurable. . . . lead[ing] us to a closer understanding of how we come to know ourselves through our surroundings.”
San Francisco Bay Guardian:
“The California Poem works through a skillful blend of intuition and organization, and it succeeds as purposely subjective music sharing a private but valuable experience of landscape.”
Poetry Project Newsletter:
“Exuberant . . . With satisfying insouciance, Sikelianos includes just about everything about her experience of the Golden State. Life, death, time, sex, memory, art-making, the sun, the desert and the ocean lead us down into the specifics of local geography, flora and fauna and from there back to knowing in all its forms.”
Café Review:
“Reading The California Poem is like soaring high above California.”
Poetry Flash:
“A big, book-length work, rolling, free form . . . You could probably trace this poetic expansiveness right back to Whitman; certainly there are tastes of Kerouac, Anne Waldman, maybe even Sharon Doubiago’s book-length poems enter in. But this is very much Eleni Sikelianos’s own.”
Altar Magazine:
“[Sikelianos’s] scope is so vast, her command of language so sure, you don’t need to have ever stepped foot in California to appreciate this poem.”
Verse:
“The California Poem, Sikelianos’ majestically composed long poem, in vitally reconceptualizing what may pass for American pastoral, memorizes and recites back to us the viscera of a nation’s atoms.”
Double Room:
“[Sikelianos] tells the history of the Golden State, telescoping from past to present and weaving, much as her epic forbearers, events of the past onto the surface of the present, allowing her readers to digest vast arcs of time.”
Minneapolis Observer:
“[Sikelianos is] an innovator, sometimes sounding like the Beats, musical and fluid. Elsewhere, the poem is an ode to this scrappy survivor of geologic time. Sometimes, it’s elegiac. Mostly, Sikelianos is in love. And her lilting, tripping, breaking-into-a-run prose will make a believer of you, too.”
The Collegian:
“[Sikelianos’s] poems are both humorous and calculating, etching a painfully honest illustration of her California’s landscape. . . . heady, solid, theoretical and concrete.”
Library Journal:
“Whitmanesque.”
Midwest Book Review:
“The sweeping lyrics, evocative of the resilience and beauty of nature, distinguish this breathtaking celebration of California.”
Publishers Weekly:
“Sprawling and exuberant, distractingly hip and yet easy to follow, happily whimsical yet sternly attentive to ethics and to ecology, Sikelianos’s fifth book looks like her major achievement so far.”
Borders Newsletter, Boulder, CO:
“A singularly constructed tour-event through the very real and infinitely imagined golden cup of California. . . . an epic poem in the grand old tradition of Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette and Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day.”
ChicagoPostModernPoetry.com:
“Eleni Sikelianos has given ‘Generation X’ our first poetic epic.”
Fanny Howe:
“To be homesick for the whole of California requires a vast imagination. Whitman in his way was always homesick for what lay ahead and behind him. And now Eleni, female on earth, takes on the grief-engorged plateau that lies between imagination and the already-known in this truly ambitious American poem. ‘It’ is Nature. ‘It’ also is a blur of remembered facts. ‘It’ is the haunt of these pages. The Female principle and product of California dreams it, ‘as if I were the sea.’”
Bernadette Mayer:
“Get ready to think differently—devour The California Poem; record everything you were thinking while reading it. Send it to the author to create The Anecdoted Typography Of The California Poem.”
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