Memory Rehearsal

ABOUT

In 1901, Eva Palmer abandoned her life as a privileged New York socialite, moving to Paris with her lover, the writer, photographer and salonist, Natalie Barney. The two Americans became the center of a wild tangle of lesbian love affairs and backyard performances based in an intentional reimagining of Sappho's work and life. This hotbed of early European modernism saw in the ancient past the possibility for sexual and artistic emancipation, especially for lesbian women.

A chance encounter led Eva to Greece, where she married Angelos Sikelianos, a visionary poet who would become a Greek national hero. Together, they decided to stage a revival of the ancient Delphic festivals, convinced that it would open a path to world peace. By the end of two festivals, their meticulous reproductions had managed to change the course of modern Greek cultural history, even as their marriage dissolved. Eva returned to the U.S. and spent the next decades of her life in debt and eventually homeless, but she never stopped pursuing her vision, convinced of the revolution of consciousness these art festivals could bring about.

Celebrated American poet Eleni Sikelianos grew up knowing little of her illustrious ancestors, and it was not until the age of 20, on her first trip to Greece, that she encountered the breadth of their legacy. In Memory Rehearsal, Sikelianos unearths the story of her pioneering ancestor trying to make a place for herself, in a text that shifts between prose, poetry, imaginary performance texts, fiction, and nonfiction, with archival and family photographs.

This is the third book in a trilogy of hybrid memoirs in which Sikelianos reckons with a family shaped by mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. Grappling with knots of personal and broader histories, she performs a powerful act of recovery, re-situating herself by claiming her lineage.

PRAISE

"An extraordinarily beautiful and complex poet's feat of hyperthymesia, where superior autobiographical memory is transcendent and interwoven with passionately researched documentation. What is the desire that pushes the psyche, and this particular major poet, on this enormous and endless task of devotion, poetry, telepathy and love? Sikelianos's voyage is a spiritual quest to untangle a history that only she and only poetry can accomplish. It is a meditation on gender, place, and reclamation, a struggle for a whole vision and version for the writer of her own self and purpose. The genius of this pursuit is staggering. . . .The intricate weaving and array of image and language to get there leaves me breathless. There is nothing like it that I have seen."
—Anne Waldman, author of Mesopotopia

"Singing at her loom like the sorceress Circe, Eleni Sikelianos weaves a spellbinding work that claims the living ghost of her poetic lineage, flowing full of her own spirit and reaching back to its source in her mythical great-grandmother, Eva Palmer Sikelianos, and the radical revival of the Delphic festivals of 1927-30. With a warp of language and a weft of memory, myth, human, animal, image, and history, this book is a magnificent, shimmering garment: polyphonic, sensorial, a sacred stitching of personal inheritance and historic past in a fiercely contemporary act."
—Phoebe Giannisi, author of Chimera

"You are turning this book in your hands, which is the first piece of good news! I cannot get enough of Eleni Sikelianos, and I could not stop reading these pages once I started! She is the poet who does not hesitate, pulling the dead forward for a closer look and conversation, 'Our ancestors have no need of all this instrumentation, yet I am struggling to hear.' Through her discovery, we question the world we thought we knew, recalibrating our love for the living!"
—CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return