Poetry. "'Philosophy never confesses / its delicate condition' writes Eleni Stecopoulos, as she takes on the inherently vulnerable role of investigative poet, asking whether the body, personal and politic, is irrevocably split off in its systemic afflictions. In this book Stecopoulos deploys the paradoxical force/fragility of poetry at all too familiar sites of our abjection. She does this with historically aware wisdom and humor. Can words help, not as palliative or consolation, but as source of transfiguring energy? 'Levitating girls' hover over 'lines gathering / all the intelligence' of an intellectually astute imagination steeped in, among many aesthetic legacies, that of ancient Greece, where the fact 'that the god descends on creaking pulleys in no way undermines the apparition.' This poet has the guts and strategy (persistent courage) of what she calls 'choric goals...waiting in the echo / for a tone,' subtending towards love"--Joan Retallack.

Author City: BERKELEY, CA USA

Eleni Stecopoulos was born in New York, NY, and now lives in Berkeley, CA. She is the author of Autoimmunity (Taxt, 2006), and her poems and essays have appeared in journals including CHAIN, ECOPOETICS, Harvard Review, XCP:CROSS CULTURAL POETICS, The Capilano Review, and THE ENCYCLOPEDIA PROJECT. She received a Creative Work Fund grant to curate a program series around art and medicine for the SFSU Poetry Center and write a related book. Stecopoulos is a graduate of the University of Virginia MFA program and the Poetics Program at Buffalo. She teaches in the Language and Thinking program at Bard College and sometimes co-directs the Paros Translation Symposium in Greece.