Published in 2020, Swan Song by Armen Davoudian won the 2020 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, as selected by Patrick Donnelly.
Davoudian’s poems and translations from Persian appear in AGNI, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.
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 […] 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.
From the chapbook description
We sat together in the country
where men like us can sit together
like this. It was night, your blond hair full
of moonlight. You took
one socked foot out of a loafer
and held it in your hand.
How easy, then, to have said, I love you.Alibi from Swan Song
If available, please consider buying a copy at Abril Books. This book may also be available for purchase through the Queer Armenian Library’s shop at Bookshop.org. If you purchase a copy through Bookshop.org we will receive a commission.
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ISBN: 978-1-949344-17-2. Published by Bull City Press.
