Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body: Apology to the Body (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry) - Softcover

Bedikian, Lory

Softcover

ISBN 10: 149624012X ISBN 13: 9781496240125

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2024

Synopsis

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 149624012X
• ISBN 13: 9781496240125
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 118