Make Yourself Happy

Complete with endpapers, photos, diagrams, and illustrations; colored chapter separators; multicolor typography; passages in French and Greek; multiple-choice questions; and more, this brief volume from Sikélianòs (The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead) is something of an event. In addition to being a thoughtful and engaging read, the work also includes plenty of visual white space for the poet's lingual balancing acts, which deconstruct form and flow, sometimes scattering words or letters across the page and other times condensing them into tight bunches. Sikélianòs provides structure by dividing her work into five sections: "Make Yourself Happy," "How To Assemble the Animal Globe," "Oracle or, Utopia [sic]," "Is There a River (Epode)," and "There Were Ancient Questions Inside My Head (Rider)." The poems themselves are often mysteries, providing only the outline of a thought, a reading experience akin to peering through a steamy window; other times, they sing and dance in the sunshine. Yet there is always a moment of surprise: "shirred/ aggregates/ mineral iridium/ irresidue/ smacked us Come/ smacked us Come/ the reactor/ Nuclear/ Heart atom/ o come."