Decoding the Hill of Dead Kings (Made in Michigan Writers)

Alex Vartan Gubbins paints a stunning portrait of a life lived between his two homelands: Michigan and Armenia. Written primarily in English with some poems in Armenian, this collection combines elegy and lyric across prose and open forms to shed light on the conundrum of diaspora―feeling rooted here, there, and in neither place entirely. Crossing the boundaries of space and time, Gubbins probes and unsettles notions of legacy, family, diaspora, geopolitical borders, and narratives of power. The ebb and flow of sadness and longing, paralleled by unshakeable spirit, ultimately settles within these poems as hope and wonder at existing in the everyday.

Alex Vartan Gubbins teaches at the American University of Armenia. A native Chicagoan, he now splits his time between the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Yerevan, Armenia. His poems can be found in And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917–2017 and North American Review.