In ancient city lamentations, the destruction of cities results from the departure of a protecting goddess, to whom female mourners negotiate the fate of their city and community. This select collection of poems from Kazandjian’s latest book, suspended line, reflects the experience of a Diasporan Armenian, whose loneliness exists “in every country / at the same time.” The lover, likened to the city itself, becomes the object of affection sought by the narrator as a place to “live within” and as a place of comfort. But that solace is temporary, and our narrator painfully embraces the lover, “together with the streets,” silently moving through familiar places—spaces of the past which now are “all sound asleep.” “In the night of the dead city / we were born”—the city was lost, just like the narrator who came upon her. The protective goddess has departed, leaving her city bare and naked, void of light, a place where the winds cease to sing. But these poems attempt to revoke this befallen fate where, “many others / forgot their birth.” Unmasked, through these suspended lines, they sing a lament of their fate through poetic verses.
Tamar Boyadjian