"Finding Grief: A Review of Lory Bedikian's 'The Book of Lamenting' by Lulu Fierro
In Issue 15 (Spring 2025), we had the pleasure of welcoming back Lory Bedikian for MORIA’s virtual First Press Reading Series promoting her new book, Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body. This book follows her first book, The Book of Lamenting, which won the Philip Levine Prize in 2010 and was published in 2011. Bedikian’s previous work has also received the Pablo Neruda Prize. MORIA published three of her recent poems in Issue 15 (Spring 2025): “Emergency Poem-Prayer for My Brother,” “Fish & Quips,” and “Critical Care.”
The Book of Lamenting was Bedikian’s first poetry collection and it talks about her feelings of displacement, as her poems dive deep into her Armenian culture. Not only that, she shares a lot about her feelings towards her family and explores how she grieves them. She uses clever metaphors that create beautiful and vivid imagery. This whole collection transports you and shows you her world through her eyes.
The book is split into four sections. The first one engages her childhood and talks about her relationship with her brother and how her grieving her brother bleeds into them moving from Armenia, and how that trauma affects how she starts to become accustomed to this new world. The second section talks about the move to Los Angeles and how that affected her Armenian heritage. The third section battles with the idea of processing trauma. The fourth section is about finding acceptance and moving on.
She starts the collection off with her poem, “Beyond the Mouth,” a poem that heavily relies on bird metaphors, like “The women shut / their mouths when they don't approve,” The first section also emphasizes her relationship with her deceased brother and how his death affects her. A poem where this is showcased beautifully is “The Brother.” The piece had a really powerful ending with “he reaches / the other side,” in which the line break right before “the other side” intensifies its distance.
Another poem that stood out to me is the namesake poem, “The Book of Lamenting” — with reason, as this piece seems to be the strongest of the collection. The placement of the piece — at the end of the second section — is perfect, as it’s a way of recapturing your attention this far into the collection. The way the title flows into the first stanza, “begins on the edges of highways” and the first piece of strong imagery of the sun being full or pregnant: “where the sun raises its swollen belly.” I also really like how there's a mention of a crow in the fourth stanza that reappears near the end of the poem:
The road matters more than the earth,
more than those on the road, it turns
into a spine, ladder of teeth and bone.
In the passenger seat, my grandmother’s ghost
holds a palm full of seeds, scatters them
skyward for the crows to eat.
All of it behind us now. She tells me
not to tangle my nerves, not to stop
the creed of the open road—
nothing that runs can stay the same.
My favorite line is the last one, “Nothing that runs can stay the same.” It’s such a strong ending to a poem, it makes that piece stand up as a whole. It makes you think about yourself and your issues.
The fourth section reels you back in, giving you another strong piece with “Desk,” which captures the essence of crashing in a manic way. It’s a very interesting study on mental health. I like the line, “Parachutes of waves.” It’s almost comical seeing a wave as something safe, like a parachute, and comparing them to one another. I also really like the line, “The tsunami, / this ocean is full of debris.” This paints such a vivid image of a tsunami crashing into an ocean, which seems counter intuitive — and that’s the point. It’s supposed to make you think twice before hitting you with the waste accumulating in the ocean, a message about environmental degradation that also subconsciously delivers a message about the detritus building up within our own mental health. I like the ending too, “I have been swimming for days,” ending with a cry for help. This poem also ends up opening the last section.
The fourth section and the book end with the poem, “Self-Portrait with Crane.” I find the bird references throughout the book very interesting, and it was an easy metaphor and connection to spot. I really like how she is the crane in this poem. The poem is a quick run-down of the author’s family moving from Armenia to the United States. She calls herself “the common Armenian crane” at the beginning of the poem, and then the poem ends: “Even as I / watch the world series, a fly ball / turns back into the crane.” Beginning with something so American — the World Series — and then turning it into something that reminds her of her cultural home — the crane — really brings a certain peace to her situation and closure to her move to Los Angeles. Armenia is not so lost.
Overall, I think The Book of Lamenting is a beautiful collection of poems about how Bedikian handles grief over the deaths in her family, how she goes through a bit of an identity crisis being Armenian in the United States, and how she blends this new life and identity into the old one.
lulu fierro
Lulu Fierro currently lives in California and is going into her last year at Woodbury University, where she studies Professional Writing. She has been able to mix her love for motorsports — specifically, IndyCar — and creative writing to bring a fun new podcast for the fans who love to giggle and Google the rules: Indytalk. When she is not on a racetrack, she can either be seen at a beach or on a bed.