Armen Davoudian

Swan Song Armen Davoudian

Poetry. California Interest. Middle Eastern Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Winner of the 2020 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. A swan song is a song of departure: after a lifetime of silence, the legend goes, the mute swan breaks into song just before leaving this world for good. Armen Davoudian's SWAN SONG chronicles what it's like to take leave of a home, a country, a past life. In their search for a home in language, these poems combine the formal resources of English and Persian poetry, turning the immigrant's permanent sense of loss and rootlessness, the gay person's sense of alienation, into artistic assets--positions of outsiderhood from which to witness and record.