You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek)

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

This is the tale of Melena, five times married, mother of three, burlesque dancer, and “the toughest, hardest-assed woman to ever eat wood and bite nails.” Located in history and memory, the real and the imagined, her life cracks open questions of identity at the heart of an American, immigrant, woman’s experience. You Animal Machine offers a glimpse of both the violence and the beauty of the margins, where “outskirts make their own centers.”

Publication date: June 10, 2014

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 126 pages

ISBN: 9781566893602

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 hybrid memoirs, The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek). Sikelianos teaches in 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.

“This is writing and reading as adventure, where every page can bring a different sort of revelation.”

—Kirkus, starred review

“With her latest book, Eleni Sikelianos sashays with the essay, teasing us with the literary device’s exotic form.”

—Los Angeles Review

“Sikelianos’ portrait includes poems, unusual typography, and photographs that would not look out of place in a W. G. Sebald novel.”

—Booklist

“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

“Readers are granted entrance into an unconventional method of storytelling Sikelianos has made all her own.”

—Bookslut

“A moving story told in an inventive form.”

—Shelf Unbound

“Poetry, translation, narration, novelization, and memory all grapple for your attention in this brilliant debut novel.”

—BuzzFeed

“No matter how one summarizes its scope or achievement, You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) will surpass it, with its too much mother-static, its fundamental wildness.”

—Maggie Nelson

“This is Sikelianos at her most rapturous and hallucinatory.”

—John D'Agata