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In the Architecture of Bone
By Alan Semerdjian
Reviewed by Erin McKnight
GenPop Books, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9823594-0-2
Paperback, 120 pp., $15
In search of “a dare of home,” Alan Semerdjian confronts the structure of Armenian memory as located within genocide and genetics. Laying out an assemblage of cultural fragments interpreted through the politics of art and custom and nation and family, In the Architecture of Bone constitutes the poet’s visual exploration of how an “only child” navigates a landscape littered with a burdensome history’s “one of everything.”
Rived into “A Fortune in a Cup of Turkish Coffee” and “The Ruler of the Universe,” Semerdjian’s 35 poems trace ancestry through an extended Armenian-American family housed in a single apartment building—cartilage inflexible against assimilation. Serving as the collection’s imposing if ephemeral presence as “the idea of family” is the poet’s deceased cubist-impressionist grandfather: “a painter invested in dreams,” yet weighted by a memory permanently “interrupted” by war. Equally affecting is Semerdjian’s fleshy rendering of his mother, the feminine martyr figure: “Her, of the safety / of home, the hallway, a life / next door to her mother / and father,” who fails to comprehend “It’s not enough / to want a son to fill a hole in a life / surrounded by and feeding men who / are dreaming of other places.” Reconstructive work proves punishing and painstaking, yet the poet’s patience and respect for human life, particularly for the remains of those who share his genetic material, is evident in his handling of even the most splintered traces.
It is through his palpation of the remnants of a severed heritage that Semerdjian confronts an ironic subtracting and adding to his isolating emotional terrain, yet his grandfather more readily embodies the perpetual “orphan”—with “war / at the other end of [his] umbilical cord.” Semerdjian comes to perceive, through an artistic rendering of remembrance as primal yet inaccessible, that his grandfather’s life actually began “in the middle of the story / so [he] never [knew] how far away [memory] really was.” Distance is clearly related to perspective, but capturing it—even as a still life—proved impossible for a deceased impressionist who “hide[s] from the [grandson that] seek[s]”:
The tablecloth is a ghost of yesterday,
suspended in the séance of air.
Behind this, he constructs a highway
of his country’s memory: borders
of mountains and mountains of borders.
The grid is jagged, interrupted, at times bent.
There is a lake of diamonds he recalls,
But he doesn’t know where to put it.
Despite its inevitably static architecture, memory “doesn’t sit still / till it’s suddenly ripped open.” Indeed, its hyphenation forms the topographical depression in which the body’s most structurally crucial bones are strewn. The mass grave of Americanization may be responsible for the “stolen / and revolted language” that Semerdjian, as an immigrant, speaks; yet, his predominant concern of “Who will hear [his] sound?” as he has “lost [his] voice / in the left of the past. / Here, for years, before, and ago” circumvents temporal, geographic, and familial concerns.
The collection’s language may clearly express heredity, yet the poet’s translation remains obscure, his vocabulary “an almanac” or “tank of definitions” resistant to evolutionary mutation. If “Everything’s a secret” and he doesn’t “have the right / to everything / [he] never felt,” vocalizing the past is possible only through the mouths of those willing to “[whisper] storms” in the poet’s depicted “desert of lasting” after “assum[ing] the gravity of [their] assigned seats” at the kitchen table. Genocide may have “blow[n] past the family’s eyes,” but it did not do so unnoticed, for the articulation of truth and emotion through an immigrant’s “only child” singularity is resultant upon the same “Desert / sand in the eyes” that the poet’s grandfather surely blinked against while painting; for Alan Semerdjian, this sand may by caught in his throat, but his “memory invents itself” through an impressive fluency “in families.”
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Prick of the Spindle fiction editor Erin McKnight is a Scottish-born writer now living in Texas. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Web, the Pushcart Prize, and W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction. Her collection of short short stories, To the Quick, was published by Recycled Karma Press, and her reviews of fiction and poetry titles can be found at Bookslut.com. Erin holds an MFA in creative writing and currently teaches fiction writing online and in the Dallas community college system.
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