Your Kingdom
Eleni Sikelianos
Reviewed by Bailey McKinney
In her 10th book of poetry, Your Kingdom, published in January by Coffee House Press, Eleni Sikelianos is unafraid to name, to speak, to summon “all the previous / & current species living in your / veins snuggled asleep inside you.”
With its footnotes, diagrams, and glossary (where piehole lovingly rests between phototrophic and preauricular sinus), it feels one part poetry collection, one part textbook. Or maybe some fusion thereof—in the opening poem, the daughter warns, “Watch what you say / She’s a poet / She takes notes.” Your Kingdom steps into the role of poetic field journal, full of observations on the natural, while at the same time working against our illusions of being bystanders. I almost expected to pick it up and see a leaf frond, tenderly pressed, fall out.
The living connection between the past, evolution, language, and the body resonates throughout the collection. Sikelianos says, “Biology, like language, is remembering.” In lines like “swirling sparking sparkling darkling” and “stone bone boner beak,” we see words laid out side by side like skulls in an anatomy museum, where we can then pick apart how they are related, trace the branches from the Germanic to the Celtic down the trunk to their Proto-Indo-European roots. Here, language and the body become entwined (“a ragged // neuron dangling like a / participle”), the growth over millennia of our endocranial capacity twinned with the evolution of *r̥kþos to bear.
While Your Kingdom brings the past and present together, it also looks to the future. “Tooth to Bite” reflects the growing political and military tensions through the pattern of predation and adaptation, and several poems shiver with the implications of climate change. Sikelianos reminds us we are all born into a history we didn’t make, and the reality of being both “in time / and out of it.” Of the many beautiful and touching moments in Your Kingdom, what stuck with me was how Sikelianos always brings us back to language. How, in the face of extinction (“a central feature of your model / you went wild with it”), she urges us toward conversation: “You are replying to your environment. What / has your environment asked?”
For me, the answer lies in the titular poem, when “an [i] becomes a [u], around / the fire you switch to pure sound in the dark / and I know what you mean.” It’s human connection, a moment of communication and empathy, that offers the spark of hope.