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Poetry is Blood
Guernica Editions, Spring 2018
102 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771832793
ISBN10: 1771832797
English
$20.00 Canada, $20.00 US
Read more from the Essential Poets Series
Combining eloquent lyrics and edgy anti-lyrics, the poems in Poetry is Blood both rehearse and flout conventions of lyric poetry to speak with deep-rooted melancholy about family and tribal history, ancient walls, paintings, monuments, martyred poets, and genocidal madness. These pieces have the wide cross-stylistic reach of elegy yet fearlessly resist any redemptive rhetoric.
If I could touch his lips with words, / my fingertips would turn to gold from Horus. / He was a father and he was not, / in a time that was / and a time that wasn't.
One by one, the numberless, nameless victims of the Armenian genocide are raised from the dead in Keith Garebian’s Poetry is Blood. Some are liberated triumphantly from systematic “seizures of autumn”; some are raised tenderly yet without false sentiment from “coffins of sunset.” And all are given—as we are given—words to speak with beyond those of “final vocabularies”; words that, a century after this most hideous example of hatred and horror, burn like “live coals on our tongues.”
Douglas Burnet Smith
There were moments throughout where I forgot to breathe. These are deeply truthful poems.
Barry Dempster
Keith Garebian writes “I cannot forget the Golgotha we trod” and his new book length sequence of poems bears that out. Poetry is Blood is a passionate and riveting journey into Armenian genocide memory and trauma, vision, and fact. Garebian’s poems bear witness across generations, reminding us that poetic imagination makes the past urgent.
Peter Balakian
Books by Keith Garebian
