You Must Become Field by Perla Kantarjian

You Must Become Field moves with astonishing fluidity from the 1915 arrest of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople to a 2025 Beirut club bathroom, where girls fix each other's eyeliner between airstrikes. Kantarjian's poems braid genocide's long aftermath with the urgent present: Lebanon's economic collapse, the port explosion's glass rain, Artsakh's exodus, war in Lebanon - without flattening either into metaphor. Here is girlhood and nationhood, seedless grapes at Tesco, wedding preparations and war, all held in the same devoted attention.

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