You Must Become Field

Perla Kantarjian''s debut poetry collection, You Must Become Field moves with astonishing fluidity from the 1915 arrest of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople to a 2025 Beirut club bathroom. Girlhood and nationhood, wedding preparations and war, are all held in the same devoted attention.

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 braids 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.

Perla Kantarjian is a Lebanese-Armenian writer with recent work in Mizna, Electric Literature, Wasafiri, The Rumpus, and Black Warrior Review. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, longlisted for the National Poetry Competition, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. She earned her MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. You Must Become Field (Bad Betty Press) is her debut poetry collection..