Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body

By Lory Bedikian

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 her multi-form collection, Bedikian contemplates the concept of fate, destiny (jagadakeer), and the excavation of memory—whether to question familial inheritance or claim medical diagnoses.

Winner of the 2023 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body builds a eulogy in poems, claiming loss, the body’s failure, often interrupted with monologues and rants. The voice is that of a daughter of immigrant parents from Lebanon and Syria, of Armenian descent, now gone.

University of Nebraska Press (September 2024)