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.