What Else Will You Love Me Despite?

Armen Davoudian’s debut collection The Palace of Forty Pillars spans time, geography and culture. The child falls asleep while reading The Book of Kings, secretly glinting fingers adorned with fish scales against the light. The adult enters their own, teaching poetry at an elite university. Crawling through poison ivy, falling in love at ‘German Camp’, the origin story of a parent’s marriage in 1989 Isfahan. This collection examines a complex identity, and explores what holds the subject to and grounds it in these identities. Most powerfully, the life of the senses defines the poems: mother’s cooking, juice of blackberries and pomegranates, and particularly fragrances: sharing rosewater shampoo with mother, men who smell of fenugreek, the intimacy of saffron.

These poems are tender, intricately negotiating a queer identity within a family’s love and expectation, balancing its abrasions against the socially conservative Islamic Republic of Iran, and observing how easily this balancing act is fumbled.

The book’s sonnet, ghazal and rubaiyat forms, and recourse to rhyme, anchor the poems in song. The blurb describes this collection as ‘formally radical’, though one could argue calling upon these centuries-old forms can be seen as the antithesis of radical. At times the poems are less agile in phrasing, with some awkward formal results, e.g., ‘The West is stealing clouds from Persian skies / Death to America! Militarize!’ (‘The Ring’); ‘where they used to have ammo. / A mother shouts, te amo’ (‘Passage’).

Debuts can risk overdoing formal display. ...