Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body

Download or read book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body written by Lory Bedikian and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2024-09 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.