Armen Davoudian

Jul 1, 2024 | literaryreview.co.uk | Rory Waterman |Armen Davoudian |Hugo Williams

Many contemporary poems – tonally flat, medicinal blocks of prose – do not encourage reading aloud, so the four reworked Lincolnshire folk tales of Rory Waterman’s Come Here to This Gate are a treat. Waterman has mastered that unfashionable form, the narrative poem. Anapaests, enjambment and witty rhymes (‘Lidl’ and ‘idyll’) propel these cathartic bursts of comic strangeness.

May 1, 2024 | poetryfoundation.org | Fatemeh Shams |Armen Davoudian |Janani Ambikapathy

Fatemeh Shams is a Persian poet and scholar, whose chapbook, Hopscotch, translated by Armen Davoudian, traces the uncanny route of an Iranian exile through Berlin: I walk in you beside Picasso’s women, their shattered faces past the swans and dismal mice of the Landwehrkanal on an ex-Bolshevik sidewalk clad in black leather, a full-time loner In the titular poem, the chalk lines on the street behave like a boundary between the present and the past—with each hop, the prospect of reaching...

Apr 10, 2024 | electricliterature.com | Armen Davoudian |Sarah Ali

Poets for generations have contended with the indeterminable, fluid relationship between the speaker and the self. We all know the dictum to write what you know, but I find more possibility and permission in Eudora Welty’s way: “Write about what you don’t know about what you know.”In my debut collection of poems, Theophanies, I explored matrilineage, motherhood, and gendered violence through the lens of the most personal thing about me that others know—my name.

Mar 19, 2024 | airlightmagazine.org | Armen Davoudian

I’ll always be in love with Father Tigran. I’ll wear a long black robe and never marry. I’ll stroke my bushy beard and lecture onthe Holy Translators of the fifth century,who invented the Armenian alphabetto record the Bible. To translate means to carryfrom one place to another, like a jet. We are their inheritors in this Muslim country.

Mar 13, 2024 | therumpus.net | Armen Davoudian

The Author: Armen DavoudianThe Book: The Palace of Forty Pillars(Tin House, 2024)The Elevator Pitch: In formally charged verse, The Palace of Forty Pillars explores questions of belonging and alienation in the life of a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America. ***The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from? Armen Davoudian: There is no single origin. For a long time, I would wake up in the wrong place.