Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body

Lory Bedikian

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781496241276
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Ode to Their Leaving
• Hiereeg [means father in Armenian]
• Meditation on Fractured Vertebrae
• Father dreams of Gibran
• Theorizing Vahan’s Departure
• Psychosomatic disorder
• Chaparral
• If only he had written his refugee song
• WHEN YOU ARE WRITING YOUR FATHER’S HEADSTONE
• The Tooth is Dead
• Miereeg [means mother in Armenian]
• Before the Elegy, Speak to Her
• Fragments of Melancholy from Those Rooms, Those Rooms
• Broccoli
• The pharmaceutical that killed my mother
• Syllabics for My Mother
• Zevart, Ode to Joy
• Fragment
• Sestina, as my mother cooks
• Another word for bitterness is ache
• Yehs [means I in Armenian]
• Apology to the Body
• Looking at the MRI Six Years Later
• Beloved Denial
• Ode to Illness: rant in the form of monologue
• Hypochondria
• Needle Biopsy
• Optic Neuritis
• I make love to my lesions
• Defining 50 Lesions
• Partial Tubectomy Revisited
• Harmonic Implications on Daylight Saving Time
• Manifesto
• In Lieu of an Epilogue
• When Your Mother Dies During a Pandemic
• Pandemic Tally: At Odds with May
• Longevity: part pseudo-memoir, part commentary
• Flare-Up: Week Eleven, Twelve
• Lexicon
• The Disease in Me May Be a Demigod After All
• Ability
• My Shaking Hand Will Not Determine My Fate
• To have a backbone can also mean to have spunk
• Jagadakeer: In Remission
• 1. History
• 2. Exam
• 3. Technique
• 4. Comparison
• 5. Findings
• 6. Impression: without contrast
• 7. Impression: with contrast
• Acknowledgments
• About Lory Bedikian
• Series List