Eleni Sikelianos in conversation with Matthew Zapruder
City Lights celebrates the Book Launch for
Memory Rehearsal
by Eleni Sikelianos
Published by City Lights Books
One of Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated Books for 2026
A genre-busting encounter between a poet and her ancestral past documenting a startling intersection of queer history, ancient theater, utopian visions, and modern poetry.
In 1901, Eva Palmer abandoned her life as a privileged New York socialite, moving to Paris with her lover, the writer, photographer and salonist, Natalie Barney. The two Americans became the center of a wild tangle of lesbian love affairs and backyard performances based in an intentional reimagining of Sappho’s work and life. This hotbed of early European modernism saw in the ancient past the possibility for sexual and artistic emancipation, especially for lesbian women.
A chance encounter led Eva to Greece, where she married Angelos Sikelianos, a visionary poet who would become a Greek national hero. Together, they decided to stage a revival of the ancient Delphic festivals, convinced that it would open a path to world peace. By the end of two festivals, their meticulous reproductions had managed to change the course of modern Greek cultural history, even as their marriage dissolved. Eva returned to the U.S. and spent the next decades of her life in debt and eventually homeless, but she never stopped pursuing her vision, convinced of the revolution of consciousness these art festivals could bring about.
Celebrated American poet Eleni Sikelianos grew up knowing little of her illustrious ancestors, and it was not until the age of 20, on her first trip to Greece, that she encountered the breadth of their legacy. In Memory Rehearsal, Sikelianos unearths the story of her pioneering ancestor trying to make a place for herself, in a text that shifts between prose, poetry, imaginary performance texts, fiction, and nonfiction, with archival and family photographs.
This is the third book in a trilogy of hybrid memoirs in which Sikelianos reckons with a family shaped by mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. Grappling with knots of personal and broader histories, she performs a powerful act of recovery, re-situating herself by claiming her lineage.
Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and “master of mixing genres.” As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and two unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine. Among other honors, she has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Artists fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in nonfiction. She grew up in Goleta, California, and now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Matthew Zapruder is the author most recently of the poetry collections I Love Hearing Your Dreams (Scribner, 2024), and How to Continue (The Economy Press, 2025). His previous books also include Why Poetry (Ecco/Harper Collins) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. He teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California, and plays music with The Figments and We Are Leaves. You can find him on Substack or at matthewzapruder.com
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation