Eleni Sikelianos

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.

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail

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"Praise for Eleni Sikelianos: Library Journal Best Books 2013: Poetry Electric as a lightning storm, wild as a first-growth forest, protean as fantasy's shape-shifters-that's Sikelianos's poetry, a real pleasure to read."-Library Journal Using text and images, moving jaggedly across the page and across ideas, creating ever expanding loops, Sikelianos asks how it is we have come to wreck earth's ecosystem-and continue to wreck it-in a hedonistic pursuit...

How have women poets approached the question of eros throughout history? This collection explores the poetry of both physical and spiritual longing and fulfillment from ancient Greece to New York's East Village. In 50 poems, more than a dozen women poets express all the facets of desire. Included in this collection are Sappho, Mirabai, Hilda Dolittle [H.D.], Emily Dickinson, Anne Waldman, Olga Broumas, Brenda Coultas, Julie Patton, Eleni Siké ...