Book of Jon

Eleni Sikelianos is the winner of the 2002 National Poetry Series, a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, two Gertrude Stein Awards, and the James D. Phelan Award. She is the author of various poetry collections and her work has appeared in many magazines and journals. She is currently on the faculty of the Naropa Institute.

"In the past century, poetic collage has gone from revolutionary composition method to creative-writing exercise, but it has lost none of its force … The contemporary collage poem in particular has proved itself to be a remarkably flexible form, capable of containing many matters and arguments and of availing itself readily of reflexivity and meta-collage … The Book of Jon is beautifully and scrupulously written, and like many of the grand collages of the past century, it acknowledges that human experience is by definition partial, fragmentary, and riddled with obfuscations, as is the art that most faithfully reflects it."—Susan M. Schultz, The Boston Review"Eleni Sikelianos is no ordinary memoirist. She is first and foremost a poet, and it's the precision and thoughtfulness of her language that draws us in. In it she explores her troubled love for her father in a series of short chapters that incorporate observations, rants, dreams, letters, a family tree, photographs, poetry."—Andrew Ervin, The Washington Post"The Book of Jon is a poem in the form of a memoir, a tragedy in the form of gradual revelation, a tale in the form of a nightmare from which you are not allowed to wake. It is a book of rare beauty, an elegy comprised of affirmation, illustration, divination, and pure loss."—Laura Wright, The American Book Review