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.

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.”

There were moments throughout where I forgot to breathe. These are deeply truthful poems.

Garebian is the son of a survivor and, along with his father, carries the scars, scars that find expression and witness in Poetry is Blood. The collection begins with an image that echoes throughout, and the poem sets an emotional tone that reverberates across individual poems.