Poetry Is Blood

By (author): Keith Garebian

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.

AUTHOR

Keith Garebian

Keith Garebian (son of an Armenian father and Anglo-Indian mother) was born in Bombay, India, and immigrated to Canada in 1961. Following his PhD in Canadian and Commonwealth Literature from Queen’s University, he began his freelance career as literary and theatre critic, producing over two dozen books, two chapbooks, and hundreds of articles, features, interviews, and reviews. A resident of Mississauga, he has won numerous nominations and awards, including the William Saroyan Medal (Armenia) and four Mississauga Arts Awards.


Reviews

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.


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Excerpts & Samples ×

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.

Reader Reviews

Details

Dimensions:

80 Pages
8in * 5in * 0.25in
130gr

Published:

April 01, 2018

City of Publication:

Hamilton

Country of Publication:

CA

Publisher:

Guernica Editions

ISBN:

9781771832793

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Canadian

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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