Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body
Winner of the 2023 Book Prize in Poetry
The winner of the 2023 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry is Lory Bedikian for her manuscript “Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body,” chosen by guest judges Hilda Raz and Ed Roberson with Kwame Dawes, Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner. Bedikian will receive a $3,000 award and publication by the University of Nebraska Press.
Ed Roberson praised Badikian’s poetry, writing, “the poet has created a monument of rage in facing the march of calamities against a life. Constant misfortune begins with their family displacement from a homeland, the multiple poverties of a refugee existence, through each parental and lover’s loss…. How deeply and broadly this rage can inform a life, the world will be very disconcerting — but yet rewarding — to many readers of this exquisitely composed work.”
Several of Bedikian’s poems received the First Prize Award in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry as part of the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards and are featured in the 44th issue of the Nimrod International Journal. Her poems were also selected as a finalist in the 2022 Contest from Black Warrior Review. Her collection, “The Book of Lamenting,” was awarded the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Bedikian earned an MFA from the University of Oregon.
About the Book
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.
Praise
“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
