Earliest Worlds: Two Books

This impressive debut of a major new voice in poetry begins with *Blue Guide*, a poem cycle of meditations on light and dark, probing the opposing/complementary nature of these universal principles and their manifestation through words. In *Of Sun, Of History, Of Seeing*, the oracular power of language fuels the journey between constellations shimmering above and the mind shimmering in response below, between phenomenology and phenomena. The author of five chapbooks, **Eleni Sikelianos** has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing. Her work has appeared in *Grand Street, Chicago Review*, and *Sulfur.* She lives in New York. ***Blue Guide*** **Contents** \[It is not enough that\], 15 Matter has been Blown off the Surface, 16 The Stone I was Bothering, 17 \[Dear Flaubert\], 19 The Most Beautiful Theorems, 20 Everyone in the Country's got a Clubfoot, 22 \[As a child\], 23 Chapters: of I Define the Darkness Correct, 24 \[Again, several years passed\], 36 Book of Tributes: Cosmorama, 37 Lights, 38 \[Fresh from the latitudes\], 39 The Typical Hand, 40 \[This, (my) brain-truck\], 42 \[Most of my life\], 43 Thus, Speak the Chromograph, 44 \[Polar citadel\], 47 City between cycles of light, 48 \[Now the bells have begun\], 50 \[I always took shadow for shelter\], 51 \[The devil was known for\], 52 Worn like a corsage, 53 O quanta qualia suntilla sabbatta, 55 \[Here is a story\], 56 \[You can be King of the Corners\], 57 The brambles of cavalry (Quamash), 58 The Secret Life of J.K. Huysmans / parataxis, 62 \[I will soon make my animal tears\], 63 Chapters: Touching the Original Matter, 64 Campo santo, , 73 \[Someone is sewing next to me\], 74 The decameron, 75 Of the True Human Fold, 77 \[They are chasing me home again\], 78 "The birds are at their highest thoughts of leaving", 79 \[Here we are on the place St. Sulpice\], 80 The well-tempered clavicle, 81 \[When the things was a?re\], 82 The river's which river's why, 83 \[As a result, some astronomers\], 85 Under