Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body: The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Autor Lory Bedikianen Limba Engleză Paperback – sep 2024
Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body presents the voice of a daughter of immigrant parents, now gone, from Lebanon and Syria and of Armenian descent. In this five-part testimony Lory Bedikian reconstructs the father figure, mother figure, and the self. Using a sestina, syllabics, prose poems, and longer poetic sequences, Bedikian creates elegies for parents lost and self-elegiac lyrics and narratives for living with illness. Often interrupted with monologues and rants, the poems grapple with the disorder of loss and the body’s failures. Ultimately, Bedikian contemplates the concept of fate, destiny (jagadakeer), and the excavation of memory—whether to question familial inheritance or claim medical diagnoses.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496240125
ISBN-10: 149624012X
Pagini: 118
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 9 mm
Greutate: 0.18 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 149624012X
Pagini: 118
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 9 mm
Greutate: 0.18 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Lory Bedikian is the author of The Book of Lamenting, winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her poems have been published in multiple journals, including Tin House, the Adroit Journal, the Los Angeles Review, and Gulf Coast. She teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles. For more information about the author, visit lorybedikian.com.
Extras
Ode to Their Leaving
As if the sky which darkened on that monumental day, the day Lebanon
would be left behind for you both, the day all relations, kin,
unshaven onlookers
grit their teeth or the kyughatsees, village women began the ritual of tears
handkerchiefs tied to the trees, the sheep slaughtered for the last feast,
as if the flight above the Atlantic and all the cirrus clouds bowing to the course,
the passport the husband opens and closes over and over again
knowing he may lose them all, to another set of civil unrests, another war
calculated like the backgammon board too large and burdensome to
bring along,
as if the teeth of the east coast’s cold, the stifled air of the small apartments
the lies that led to the losing of jobs they said would replenish
the spent money, as if all of this was not enough of a cauldron, a wingless griffin,
the husband dies first, a year later the wife dies, and these two called
father, mother in one’s eeriest and quietest sleep, not birth-like
or dream-like,
but the time of post-midnight hallucinatory lullabies and afterthoughts.
Why do you not say who you are? Say it. Say daughter. Daughter holding genetics
of immigrant ink stains, holding the small histories of their breakfast
blabbering.
And so what did you know of their demise? Father scanned the news of the world,
knew the guilt of countries and mustached biographies, while he never
spoke of his ills. The spine fractured, the valves road blocked, the vocal cords
bombed. If anger was his food, then food was his poison. The bites didn’t
matter, the morsels mother fed him mocked even the smallest capillaries.
And mother
did you tell him what was coming or did you decide to follow?
Is it a daughter’s
greatest sin to ask? But look how quiet I am. I watch the world cry itself to sleep.
I pinch the spices into their bowls as you did the day you were married,
as you did on the unbelievable days you died.
As if the sky which darkened on that monumental day, the day Lebanon
would be left behind for you both, the day all relations, kin,
unshaven onlookers
grit their teeth or the kyughatsees, village women began the ritual of tears
handkerchiefs tied to the trees, the sheep slaughtered for the last feast,
as if the flight above the Atlantic and all the cirrus clouds bowing to the course,
the passport the husband opens and closes over and over again
knowing he may lose them all, to another set of civil unrests, another war
calculated like the backgammon board too large and burdensome to
bring along,
as if the teeth of the east coast’s cold, the stifled air of the small apartments
the lies that led to the losing of jobs they said would replenish
the spent money, as if all of this was not enough of a cauldron, a wingless griffin,
the husband dies first, a year later the wife dies, and these two called
father, mother in one’s eeriest and quietest sleep, not birth-like
or dream-like,
but the time of post-midnight hallucinatory lullabies and afterthoughts.
Why do you not say who you are? Say it. Say daughter. Daughter holding genetics
of immigrant ink stains, holding the small histories of their breakfast
blabbering.
And so what did you know of their demise? Father scanned the news of the world,
knew the guilt of countries and mustached biographies, while he never
spoke of his ills. The spine fractured, the valves road blocked, the vocal cords
bombed. If anger was his food, then food was his poison. The bites didn’t
matter, the morsels mother fed him mocked even the smallest capillaries.
And mother
did you tell him what was coming or did you decide to follow?
Is it a daughter’s
greatest sin to ask? But look how quiet I am. I watch the world cry itself to sleep.
I pinch the spices into their bowls as you did the day you were married,
as you did on the unbelievable days you died.
Cuprins
Ode to Their Leaving
Hiereeg [means father in Armenian]
Meditation on Fractured Vertebrae
Father dreams of Gibran
Theorizing Vahan’s Departure
Psychosomatic disorder
Chaparral
If only he had written his refugee song
WHEN YOU ARE WRITING YOUR FATHER’S HEADSTONE
The Tooth is Dead
Miereeg [means mother in Armenian]
Before the Elegy, Speak to Her
Fragments of Melancholy from Those Rooms, Those Rooms
Broccoli
The pharmaceutical that killed my mother
Syllabics for My Mother
Zevart, Ode to Joy
Fragment
Sestina, as my mother cooks
Another word for bitterness is ache
Yehs [means I in Armenian]
Apology to the Body
Looking at the MRI Six Years Later
Beloved Denial
Ode to Illness: rant in the form of monologue
Hypochondria
Needle Biopsy
Optic Neuritis
I make love to my lesions
Defining 50 Lesions
Partial Tubectomy Revisited
Harmonic Implications on Daylight Saving Time
Manifesto
In Lieu of an Epilogue
When Your Mother Dies During a Pandemic
Pandemic Tally: At Odds with May
Longevity: part pseudo-memoir, part commentary
Flare-Up: Week Eleven, Twelve
Lexicon
The Disease in Me May Be a Demigod After All
Ability
My Shaking Hand Will Not Determine My Fate
To have a backbone can also mean to have spunk
Jagadakeer: In Remission
1. History
2. Exam
3. Technique
4. Comparison
5. Findings
6. Impression: without contrast
7. Impression: with contrast
Acknowledgments
Hiereeg [means father in Armenian]
Meditation on Fractured Vertebrae
Father dreams of Gibran
Theorizing Vahan’s Departure
Psychosomatic disorder
Chaparral
If only he had written his refugee song
WHEN YOU ARE WRITING YOUR FATHER’S HEADSTONE
The Tooth is Dead
Miereeg [means mother in Armenian]
Before the Elegy, Speak to Her
Fragments of Melancholy from Those Rooms, Those Rooms
Broccoli
The pharmaceutical that killed my mother
Syllabics for My Mother
Zevart, Ode to Joy
Fragment
Sestina, as my mother cooks
Another word for bitterness is ache
Yehs [means I in Armenian]
Apology to the Body
Looking at the MRI Six Years Later
Beloved Denial
Ode to Illness: rant in the form of monologue
Hypochondria
Needle Biopsy
Optic Neuritis
I make love to my lesions
Defining 50 Lesions
Partial Tubectomy Revisited
Harmonic Implications on Daylight Saving Time
Manifesto
In Lieu of an Epilogue
When Your Mother Dies During a Pandemic
Pandemic Tally: At Odds with May
Longevity: part pseudo-memoir, part commentary
Flare-Up: Week Eleven, Twelve
Lexicon
The Disease in Me May Be a Demigod After All
Ability
My Shaking Hand Will Not Determine My Fate
To have a backbone can also mean to have spunk
Jagadakeer: In Remission
1. History
2. Exam
3. Technique
4. Comparison
5. Findings
6. Impression: without contrast
7. Impression: with contrast
Acknowledgments
Recenzii
“Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body is a capacious lyric narrative of emigration, of history, of interiority, polyglot, with a memory reaching as far as Aleppo and as near as today’s biopsy results.”—Marilyn Hacker, author of Calligraphies: Poems
“Lory Bedikian has created a monument of rage in facing the march of calamities against a life. That list of constant misfortune begins with her family displacement from a homeland, the multiple poverties of a refugee existence, through each parent’s loss. Each loss of an identity displaces the voice of the narrator, within time, between persons, even dismantling emotion. Is it the mother or daughter speaking; against each other, or in a rage of love for each other? Is it the caregiver or the patient who rages against the illness’s damage to love? This kind of shapeshifting allows varieties of poetic form, all engaged in this consistently coherent polemic of rage. How deeply and broadly this rage can inform a life. Jagadakeer’s world will be very disconcerting—yet rewarding—to readers of this exquisitely composed work.”—Ed Roberson, winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and author of To See the Earth Before the End of the World
“Bedikian’s poems speak to what becomes ‘the ritual of tears,’ of the long trip to America, ‘the east coast’s cold,’ its ‘stifled air of small apartments.’ In this book she declares herself the daughter of a people who suffered and sang, worked and wept, speaking the language they remembered in. And so the daughter remembers for them, giving them a voice, and us a smudged window through which to see the burning world. A consummate craftsperson, Bedikian writes lushly, with power and force, creating images we cannot unsee. Open this book and read her poem ‘Before the Elegy, Speak to Her,’ and see what I mean.”—Dorianne Laux, author of Only As the Day Is Long
“Clear-eyed and beautiful, the poems in Lory Bedikian’s Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body navigate a generational inheritance of trauma and anger with unflinching awareness, tenderness, and sharp-edged humor. I encourage you to read this collection from front to back, as the opening sections lay the foundation for a tremendous exploration of the interior of a life. There is so much hard-earned wisdom throughout, with a speaker that tells us ‘laughter is not happiness// after all, but the machinery of the body undoing anger,’ and ‘Don’t love// what I say because you think you should. Love/ what you hear because it makes you// question everything.’ I love what this book has to say and ‘I want everyone to stand up to choir it out. Even the dead.’”—Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet and The Goodbye World Poem
“The poems are necessary and compressed, often couplets. Nothing here is excessive, except life. The poet is fully mature and brilliantly accomplished. The tragedy of immigration, and its necessity, are defined with precision and passion. Diseases are diagnosed by needle biopsy. Conditions have names as sonorous as Armenian. The poems look forward and backward, always led by language. They transfer states of mind into space travel. They ponder similarities between a dead tooth and a dead parent. And always they speak what we must hear. ‘Self-pity can be poetry,’ Bedikian notes. ‘Show me one death that is a complete sentence.’ I need this book and think you will, too.”—Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems, 1986–2020
Descriere
Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body presents the voice of a daughter of immigrant parents, now gone, from Lebanon and Syria and of Armenian descent.