the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry Jagadakeer: Apology to Body

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.