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
“Lory Bedikian has created a monument of rage in facing the march of calamities against a life. That list of constant misfortune begins with her family displacement from a homeland, the multiple poverties of a refugee existence, through each parent’s loss. Each loss of an identity displaces the voice of the narrator, within time, between persons, even dismantling emotion. Is it the mother or daughter speaking; against each other, or in a rage of love for each other? Is it the caregiver or the patient who rages against the illness’s damage to love? This kind of shapeshifting allows varieties of poetic form, all engaged in this consistently coherent polemic of rage. How deeply and broadly this rage can inform a life. Jagadakeer’s world will be very disconcerting—yet rewarding—to readers of this exquisitely composed work.” —Ed Roberson, winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and author of To See the Earth Before the End of the World
“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
“Clear-eyed and beautiful, the poems in Lory Bedikian’s Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body navigate a generational inheritance of trauma and anger with unflinching awareness, tenderness, and sharp-edged humor. I encourage you to read this collection from front to back, as the opening sections lay the foundation for a tremendous exploration of the interior of a life. There is so much hard-earned wisdom throughout, with a speaker that tells us ‘laughter is not happiness// after all, but the machinery of the body undoing anger,’ and ‘Don’t love// what I say because you think you should. Love/ what you hear because it makes you// question everything.’ I love what this book has to say and ‘I want everyone to stand up to choir it out. Even the dead.’”—Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet and The Goodbye World Poem
“The poems are necessary and compressed, often couplets. Nothing here is excessive, except life. The poet is fully mature and brilliantly accomplished. The tragedy of immigration, and its necessity, are defined with precision and passion. Diseases are diagnosed by needle biopsy. Conditions have names as sonorous as Armenian. The poems look forward and backward, always led by language. They transfer states of mind into space travel. They ponder similarities between a dead tooth and a dead parent. And always they speak what we must hear. ‘Self-pity can be poetry,’ Bedikian notes. ‘Show me one death that is a complete sentence.’ I need this book and think you will, too.” —Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems, 1986–2020
