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Eleni Sikelianos. Your Kingdom. Coffee House Press, 2023, 144 pages: The poem, an animal, a kin.


In Your Kingdom, Eleni Sikelianos “nam[es] what is wild” (4), honoring millennia of earthly kinship through poems that mimic the unstoppable flow of life and progress. Her vivid descriptions of animals, plants, and minerals act as a mirror held up to humanity, daring us to confront where we come from and what we are becoming. This compelling poetic gesture challenges us to rediscover the ties connecting us to nature—connections severed as mankind sought to distance itself from the organic world in the name of growth, reducing humans to mere “flesh machines” (23).


This ecopoetic collection alternates between verse and prose poems, aiming to restore a sense of fraternity among beings—human, animal, or otherwise—within an environment fractured by modernity. Sikelianos’s use of punctuation and blank spaces, as well as the fragmented quality of the poems, function as visual representations of humanity’s estranged relationship with nature and, by extension, their origins.


Sikelianos employs scientific language and biological concepts to guide readers through a philosophical exploration of belonging and community in relation to the self—and toward a possible future: “you find yourself in a crux of time, connected by memory / to the past which / is the world / or / to the world, which is the past, and the shape / of the future went weirder than ever” (44).


Time lies at the heart of this collection, preoccupied with forces older than us and predating the symbolic compartmentalization of species we recognize today. Sikelianos questions humanity’s so-called supremacy over the animal and vegetal kingdoms, exposing our insignificance in the face of the grand synesthetic “animal carnival” (51), where love, life, and death have been conversing for millennia: “In the strata of the rock is recorded / some of your earlier story though some scraps of it / are lost, you read it / in ocean silt” (48).


Eleni Sikelianos bypasses any expected environmental dichotomy by dissolving the boundaries between man and animal. The equivocal address of the title—is it the reader’s, man’s, animals’ or even some deity’s kingdom?— contributes to a vision of community that centers on life in all its forms, embodied or otherwise. The poetic voice discovers connections in all things, reflecting those in matter and voice, within a world whose scale surpasses comprehension: “you were once an oceanaut in open waters in your own / private capsule, living in star-shaped structures (centuries), riding / deep / beneath the waves, rising / up for air” (45).


Amid the vast (hi)story of life that both includes and humbles us, the poet reflects on humanity’s impulse to name and control things, reducing them to a systematized order through processes of reification. She posits poetry as a way to surrender control, yielding to the whims of language as a moving, breathing otherness. Poetic language, in this collection, subverts the authority of scientific and evolutionary discourse: “The bird takes flight from its / word” (5). It conveys evolution as a spectacle, where the animals become performers who “add beauty in [their] evolutionary tricks” (67)—prompting a reconsideration of our shared familiarity with the non-human world.


Other yet recognized, selfsame yet foreign, Sikelianos’s kingdom calls on us to acknowledge how many of its children still reside in our cells: “all the previous / & current species living in your / veins snugged asleep inside you” (62).


The body—its skin, bone, and flesh—takes center stage, making this collection a profoundly sensual endeavor. The senses—touch, smell, sight, hearing, taste—inhabit the lines intimately, promising to reveal secrets hidden within our genetic code. Words brush against each other, with assonance and alliteration mapping the embodiment of life through sound: “a body breaching, spouting, winging is / its own autor/ship). Yet matter is still // sometimes deaf to your summoning” (39).


The collection celebrates life and creation. With each new poem, the reader steps into a possible future for mankind. Each stanza encapsulates a microcosm, a potential realm awaiting exploration. The poet’s careful attention to punctuation and form propels the text forward at a deliberate, leisurely pace, making the collection a hymn to the slow, measured rhythm of nature: “Here, I’ve written it. Cephalopod Poem. Along with everything else / going on inside you, it’s a memory / of the first chemical kisses / not on earth, because earth didn’t exist yet / when all this kissing started.” (112)


Yet, in celebrating life, Your Kingdom must also confront death: “I am looking at these skeletons thinking about myself—the thin / reflection in the glass where over / the incredible architectural curve of some spine I see” (17). The end of one thing coinciding with the birth of another, the poetic voice meditates on change and decay: “you have ingested many animals & arrested / their outward movement / as the deer translates itself / inside your flesh / you are rubbing up against this intimate enzymatic magic / transforming the shreds, super metaphoric” (53-54).


Language—a constellation of sounds and silence—is sown on the page and, over time, becomes a source of sustenance and survival: “you arrange your syllables like a flock / of self-forming starlings in a draft aimed out / your mouth and at an ear” (40). Product of the body, legacy of the flesh, it becomes a living thing, a (mostly) benevolent virus, sometimes an antidote to man’s incomprehensible cruelty, an agent of reconciliation of the senses and the intellect: “your thinking body touching deep & far indivisibly” (80)


The collection moves away from scientific absolutism, embracing art as a fertile gesture of preservation. Sikelianos forms, amalgamates, produces words that she weaves seamlessly through the fabric of her lines, always avoiding artificiality and soulless linguistic manufacturing. The poems then seem to reproduce autonomously, operating a form of parthenogenesis, as each ode to earthly creatures births a new species, endowed with the powers bestowed upon them by poetics. Reading the poems aloud sometimes feels like learning a new language, as the words unfamiliarly roll on the tongue, other, alien.


The collection’s concern with otherness extends to Sikelianos’s relationship with languages like Greek or French. In “Aστυνομία Nοσοκομείο”, a fraught relationship to words becomes a source of poetry, connecting the poet with something greater and more ancient: “I keep confusing words, calling / policemen hospitals, / mayors townhalls. / I mistook Corinthian Power Plant / for an ancient palace, / deep harbor / for dream. Then I remembered language / is a lingering we keep hoping will draw / up exigence like water / from a well, metal / dust toward magnetite.” (156)


Layer by layer, the discourse—scientific, philosophical, aesthetic—combines with collage and drawing, forming a complex intertext in the service of poetry. The collection invites reflection on humanity’s relationship with the unknown, the unseen, and the incomprehensible.


Ultimately, Your Kingdom reflects the ambivalence of man’s place in the world—immense yet microscopic—paying homage to our ancestors who, like us, are “beast[s] of wonder” (79).











Maud Bougerol researches and teaches contemporary American literature in Aix-en-Provence (France). More of her writing can be found on High Horse and at Dancing on the Palimpsest on Substack. She will be one of the two 2025 guest editors for Transat’, a journal of poetry in English and in French. She lives in Marseilles.

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