Poetry Is Blood

Guernica Editions (Essential Poets Series)

9781771832793

80 pages | April 1, 2018

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

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.”

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.

Kathryn MacDonald

• Interview on The Artis with Ivy Reiss