Your Kingdom

In Your Kingdom, Eleni Sikelianos honors our non-human genetic ancestries. Early on, she acknowledges that the German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1918) was both eugenicist and the source of a word that seeds this book (he also gave us the word ecology):

Phylogeny: all the plants that grew to be you. All the animals who did. I don’t mean because you were the telos causa, the reason or end result, and I don’t mean because you ate them. I mean because they invented earth. Eventually they also invented you.

The bounds of language—“each word there / mad fair / delinked and flying”—continue:

Now we were rolling around on earth drawing our tongues in
   Latin things.
We always said the bird doesn’t care what you call it.
That’s one way I’m different from a bird.

                    The bird takes flight from its
word.

This is a book of hearts, from “the blue whales’ slow car of a heart” to “the earthworm’s pseudohearts [...] wrapped around its piehole.” In answer to “Where do hearts come from?” the speaker asserts: “your ticker too is daughter / to a turtle’s who got it / off bacteria.” Evolution escalates from “First I got a tooth to bite you with / then you got a claw to smash me” to stabbing beaks, stunning stingers, and, ultimately, the threat of total annihilation: nuclear weapons. 

In a time of ecological doom, there is gorgeous comfort—if only momentary—in Sikelianos’s deep histories and epic sensibility, whether guiding us through body parts in the “Musée d’Anatomie Comparée” or through the body’s “evolution inside”:

      phonemes + genes in their own bio
        chassis delivery system, glottal stop

         in your ci-ty or bu-ton made possible by
obstructed airflow, when your organ made
        for eating, breathing began to cry out […]

Sikelianos transcends surface despair with piercing questions: 

We don’t make our own 
     bodily light but “lucifer”
we invented. The ugliest
animal on earth? How 
can all that beauty we see see 
     back at us.

And in “How Some Other Animals Do Colonies”: “You are replying to your environment. What has your environment asked?”