Selected Poems

"More than 100 years ago, Emily Dickinson wrote, "It is the pain of a poem that comes first, and the form that follows." Here in Der-Hovanessian's selected work, pain is derived from the cultural dissolution of the war-eroded and occupied country of Armenia; it resonates in concise statements about a people seeking desperately to reestablish a sense of place. The poems address this necessity through the conventions of dreamwork, invocations of the dead, personae poems and through the speaker's firsthand reporting of facts."—Publishers Weekly

"While many of Der-Hovanessian's poems and award-winning translations have appeared in small-press editions, readers without a special interest in Armenian and Armenian American poetry may have missed her work. But no one should miss this selection of old and new poems, which comprises a personal, political, and cultural history both moving and musical, bluntly stated yet elegant. . . . Newcomers to Der-Hovanessian's poems will be moved to go out and buy her translations and learn more about this world in which poets were so central they had to be murdered first. For all collections."—Library Journal