The International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA) invites you to their next 2024 Literary Lights event, featuring Armen Davoudian, author of a Publishers Weekly & The Rumpus Most Anticipated Poetry Book of 2024, The Palace of Forty Pillars. Davoudian will be joined by celebrated author and UCLA professor, Anahid Nersessian. The free event, co-sponsored by the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and The Offing literary magazine, will take place virtually on May 4, 2024 at 1:00 PM Eastern.
Wry, tender, and formally innovative, Armen Davoudian’s debut poetry collection, The Palace of Forty Pillars, tells the story of a self estranged from the world around him as a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America. It is a story darkened by the long shadow of global tragedies—the Armenian genocide, war in the Middle East, the specter of homophobia. With masterful attention to rhyme and meter, these poems also carefully witness the most intimate encounters: the awkward distance between mother and son getting ready in the morning, the delicate balance of power between lovers, a tense exchange with the morality police in Iran.
In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars—but, reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of Davoudian’s magical, ruminative poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, a home for the speaker, who is unable to return to it in life. Learn more about The Palace of Forty Pillars: www.armenianliterary.org/the-palace-of-f...