Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in social media posts, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body (Nebraska, 2024) by Lory Bedikian.
About the Book:
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.
A Word from the Author:
When we celebrated the first birthdays of our children, I didn’t throw a big party with guests, lots of kids, balloons, and party favors. Instead, I bought a small, round cake from the grocery store and lit a candle on top. We had been through a lot to get to that first birthday, and I felt organizing a huge get-together for everyone would prove exhausting and, as we all know, it’s rare for babies to remember any of it.
September 1, 2025, marks the birthday of my second book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body which won the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, published by University of Nebraska Press. Celebration is definitely in order, but again, there really is no need to throw a big party. The entire year has been full of joy, praise, readings, events, and true connectivity with community and supporters.
Readings and signings took place at venues such as Vroman’s Bookstore, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books poetry stage, and most recently The Booksmith in San Francisco. I was fortunate to read remotely with luminaries such as Brian Turner and Lee Herrick. The readings were packed and the audiences were generous in their response and support of the book. In October, 2024, the Armenian Mirror-Spectator published a review by Dr. Arpi Sarafian and then in December, 2024, Christopher Atamian wrote a generous review at the EVN Report.
But perhaps the highlight of the first year was AWP in Los Angeles. What a pleasure to meet, greet, and thank the University of Nebraska Press staff members and to shake the hand of Prof. Kwame Dawes! I will always be grateful to this amazing group of literary supporters and publishing professionals. During AWP, I was invited to sign copies of Jagadakeer at the tables/booths of Poets House, Prairie Schooner, Adroit, Letras Latinas and the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA). The amazing conference ended with a reading for Gulf Coast.
A year, really, is nothing. When I hold the book, open it to any page, there’s always a story of the poem’s history, when or where I read it to an audience, how I first saw it on the actual numbered page. When I hold the book, I can imagine my parents and what they may have said if they were still around. I imagine how I will always look back at the miracles that brought this work into the world and the hard work that put it on shelves, and in welcoming hands.
Reviews:
“Bedikian’s Jagadakeer serves as a bellwether. It announces and denounces our fears and some of our most innermost pain with prescient beauty and rare honesty. The poet can rest now, she has delivered to us a true incantation.”—Christopher Atamian, EVN Report
“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
“Jagadakeer’s affirmation of sorrow and loss as essential ingredients of life awakens the reader to the relevance of pain to her own life and gives her the strength to confront the world—albeit one of sorrow and ‘bad news again.’ ‘Show me one death that is a complete sentence’ resonates with us all. Bedikian’s brilliant compositions evidence the daughter has survived.”—Arpi Sarafian, the Armenian Mirror-Spectator
“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
In the Media:
Interview with Prairie Schooner
“An Ode to the Ode” essay featured in Literary Hub
Interview with the Massachusetts Review
From the Desk of Lory Bedikian: Jagadakeer
Excerpt on UNP’s Behind the Book blog
UNP blog 