You Animal Machine - by Eleni Sikelianos (Paperback)

About the Book

A memoir of Melena, five-times married, mother, burlesque dancer, and "the hardest-assed woman to ever eat wood and bite nails."

Book Synopsis

A memoir of Melena, five-times married, mother, burlesque dancer, and "the hardest-assed woman to ever eat wood and bite nails."

Review Quotes

"Melena strikes a playful and sharp figure in her leopard print costume. Sikelianos never lets go of the fantasy of the image, but she also explores her grandmother's underlying grit. Fans of her previous work will be sure to enjoy Sikelianos's atypical memoir." -Publishers Weekly

"A wonderfully strange and inventive book by a professor and poet who combines various forms into an unclassifiable whole. . . The writing pulsates with such life force, reckless and a little giddy, as the author surveys her family's female history, the immigration of Greeks to America. . . This is writing and reading as adventure, where every page can bring a different sort of revelation." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"This experimental memoir - part scrapbook, essay and poem - tells the story of Melena, a burlesque dancer and mother whose experiences as an American immigrant woman encompass issues of identity and belonging." -Chicago Tribune's Printers Row, The Year Ahead in Books

"Sikelianos' portrait includes poems, unusual typography, & photographs that would not look out of place in a W. G. Sebald novel." -Booklist

"[T]his hybrid work ... is simply sui generis, refreshingly unclassifiable... By the time I made it out to that rock shop in the desert, I began to feel like a detective in my own unexamined life." -Coldfront Magazine

"Through artifacts-lists of songs, newspaper clippings, photographs, film posters, staged interviews, poems-the poet Sikelianos assembles a textual chimera that keeps sliding through her fingers." -The Believer

"Eleni Sikelianos' memoir You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) is inventively told through poems, essays, and photos."-Largehearted Boy

"In her searching for answers that will not yield, and her courage of locating her own responses -- creating her own story to fill in for the material she lacks -- Sikelianos delivers more than a traditional narrative ever would. . . Readers are granted entrance into an unconventional method of storytelling Sikelianos has made all her own." -Bookslut

"Eleni Sikelianos throws the dressing robes off the essay, exposing the literary device's exotic form, just as she exposes the bare mettle of her maternal grandmother Melena."-Museum of Americana

"[You Animal Machine] is tough as nails: you can feel Sikelianos at work, forcibly stitching it with catgut string, only to watch it fly apart again."-The Believer

"[A] moving story told in an inventive form." -Shelf Unbound

"A book of outcasts, Sikelianos' poetic memoir is a remarkable exploration of personal history, the fluid nature of identity, and the impossibility of knowing everything about anyone, especially someone as complicated, changing and deliberately slippery as Sikelianos' grandmother, Melena."-Rob Mclennan, Review

"You Animal Machine offers a glimpse of both the violence and the beauty of the margins, where "outskirts make their own centers." and "Poetry, translation, narration, novelization, and memory all grapple for your attention in this brilliant debut novel." -Buzzfeed, "15 Books for Amanda Palmer and her Fans."

"Boulder poet Sikelianos has written a memoir that defies easy description but is somehow reminiscent of Beat literature." -Boulder Daily Camera

"In an age when 'research' summons the banality of search engines, Eleni Sikelianos blessedly reaches into the birth-hole, the warming dirt, the wrong side of magic, and brings forth dark whorls of language, imagination, and history. Sikelianos is a shamanistic denizen of the desert and the

About the Author

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead and The California Poem, which was a Barnes & Noble Best of the Year, as well as a hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon. Sikelianos teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. A California native, longtime New Yorker, and world traveler, she now lives in Boulder with her husband, the novelist Laird Hunt, and their daughter, Eva Grace.