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

Lory Bedikian

ISBN 10: 149624012X / ISBN 13: 9781496240125

Published by UNM5M, 2024

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-LBR-9781496240125

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)
• Publisher: UNM5M
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 149624012X
• ISBN 13: 9781496240125
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry 
Winner of the 2024 Anahid Literary Prize
 

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 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.