Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body

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 na...