THE MOON IN THE CUSP OF MY HAND
POETRYBAY·WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2020·READING TIME: 4 MINUTES
by Raffi Joe Wartanian
Lola Koundakjian, MOON IN THE CUSP OF MY HAND (Nueva York Poetry Press 2020)
When I met Lola Koundakjian in 2010, I was immediately struck by her boundless sense of joy, her passion for arts and culture, her sophisticated understanding of what makes a good story. Most of all, I was struck by how she encouraged me, supported me, and made me feel at home with myself during times when I felt I could not fully accept the various layers of my identity.
She’s a multi-lingual poet. A sculptor. A curator. A literary wizard. A chocolatier. Most of all, an inspiration. The example she sets gives permission to be the version of ourselves that is the most creative, the most ambitious, the most humble, the most curious, the most kind.
In this new collection from Nueva York Poetry Press, Koundakjian nourishes a storyteller’s spirit she grew up with in the presence of her beloved parents, Harry and Aida, brilliant Armenians from Beirut. Harry and Aida handed their daughter a torch, and Koundakjian has fed the flame into something so bright you might burn your eyes if you forget to wear sunglasses.
In the poem Memories dedicated to her mother Aida, Աստված հոգին լուսավորե, Koundakjian lets us in on the heartbreaking conversations with a mother who is losing her memory. Ending each stanza with an unanswered question or an unfinished phrase dramatizes the perpetual sense of incompletion exacted by dementia. With the strength of her love and precision of her words, the poet unpacks what it means when a parent is untethered from the memories that bind us as people, as families.
From the subject of her mother’s memory loss, Koundakjian pivots towards the loss of ancestral memory. Her poem On Food, Family, and Loss uses a trip to the Armenian and Turkish markets of New Jersey — where one is “hoofing” (great verb!) to get there — as an entry point into questions that explore the complicated relationship between the writer, and the places where that food originated. Referring to the Armenian Genocide that displaced her family, mine, and millions of others, she wonders “what our lives would be like if we had never been forced off those lands.” She ponders what kind of existence she may have had had it not been for this incomprehensible act of violence. “Would I have been a writer still?” she asks, then concluding, “I will never know what layers of my soul I am missing.”
Analyzing the Armenian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, curator and literary luminary Neery Melkonian, who passed away in 2016, wrote about the complex reckonings that contemporary artists must face, that beyond the suffocating inheritance of the Armenian Genocide are waves of further “ruptures” — the Soviet Union’s collapse, civil wars in the Middle East, pogroms in Azerbaijan, and more. Koundakjian uses her artistry to not only grapple with Melkonian’s idea of rupture, but to reckon with the memory of Melkonian as a friend. Her elegy To Neery explores inheriting Melkonian’s books and finding little clues — receipts, pencil markings, stamps — as a gateway into the lingering spirit of a loving friend gone too soon. Yet another rupture.
Pondering loss is not always a sobering pursuit in Koundakjian’s poetry. For example, as she muses in Leaving New York, a poem about the city she has known as home since 1979 after leaving her birthplace of Beirut, she wryly pledges her loyalty, “Considering the cost of extra luggage, I might as well stay put.”
For anyone who knows Lola, you know that she is deeply intertwined with New York City, as iconic a fixture of the city as the Hudson Palisades she wistfully describes as joyous and naked when etched with the barren, brown branches of winter. Her gifts as a storyteller are driven by provocative imagery and surprising associations — a personal favorite describes The New York Times serif font “as if it were cat scratches on my arm” — comes from the fact that the author is a Renaissance woman. Lover of life. Lover of language and laughter. Lover of culture and friends and family.
Such is the abundant spirit abundant in the pages of her new collection THE MOON IN THE CUSP OF MY HAND.
Raffi Joe Wartanian is a writer and musician. www.raffijoewartanian.com
