Lory Bedikian

Lory Bedikian received her BA from UCLA with an emphasis in Creative Writing and Poetry. During her time at UCLA, she was twice nominated for the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize in Poetry. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, where she received the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Her manuscript has been selected several times as a finalist in both the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Competition. She has received grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial fund and from AFFMA: Arpa Film Foundation for Music & Art. Her poems have been published in the Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Poetry International, Poet Lore and Heliotrope among other journals and have been included in Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets. Poets & Writers chose her work as a finalist for the 2010 California Writers Exchange Award. Bedikian's The Book of Lamenting won the 2010 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. She currently teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles.

THE BOOK OF LAMENTING
BY LORY BEDIKIAN
$18.00.    (email us for availability)

Winner of the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. "Lory Bedikian's THE BOOK OF LAMENTING begins within a foundation of lyricism: 'On the back of every tongue in my family / there is a dove that lives and dies.' Bedikian recognizes the genuine world of the imagination, one we inhabit but often lose sight of—a world with 'floating hieroglyphics of flame,' where sometimes one must '[e]mpty your pockets / of the noise you carry' and 'count olives / in place of coins.' Wisdom rises up through the losses in Bedikian's poetry. One poem begins: 'The year 1997 rose like a spiral staircase / into a ceiling of darkness.' THE BOOK OF LAMENTING ascends into the darkness in a similar way—bringing us gifts of light and memory, so that the small doves at the back of every tongue might sing."—Brian Turner

These are poems that make a rare intersection between history, the intimacy of memory and an unswerving attention to craft. They are attentive and melodic and we follow the speaker from dark to light, and back again, in poem after poem. This is a wonderful debut collection. — Eavan Boland

 Lory Bedikian’s The Book of Lamenting is a well-made vessel of inherited memory and experience where family becomes a country — a country of the soul that matures on the border of an urbane psyche. Each poem brims with darkness and light that reflect personal and cultural tensions. Thus, the emotional landscape here is rounded and shaped through an imaginative exactness and sobriety. A pure pleasure lives in The Book of Lamenting, but never purely for the sake of art; these fluid, urgent lines engage the humanity we all share through memory.  — Yusef Komunyakaa

Proposal

Marry me before there is more death
in this world, before those we love
 

turn to ash. Each year, the trees grow
older. Each year, I believe the branches
 

will be full of bells and veils.
I have bent trumpets into rings,
 

folded sonnets into doves.
Don’t say we’ll wait
 

for an autumn of amber leaves.
It may not come. Don’t tell me
 

I look the way I did the day
my eyes closed with wine. I see my face
 

in the weathered sky. Marry me
before we become the dry bark
 

and leaves of those decrepit trees,
faithless that a winter rain will come.