The Palace of Forty Pillars TR by Armen Davoudian

Product Details

• Publisher: Tin House (2024-03-19)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 88 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781959030362
• Item Weight: 124.74 grams
• Dimensions: 22.86 x 15.24 x 0.66 cm

Shortlisted for the 2024 Northern California Book Awards

A San Francisco Chronicle and LitHub Best Book of Spring

A Most Anticipated Book of the Season at The Rumpus, Publishers Weekly, and Autostraddle

“Brilliant and deft and heartfelt."―Richie Hofmann

Wry, tender, and formally innovative, Armen Davoudian’s debut poetry collection, The Palace of Forty Pillars, tells the story of a self estranged from the world around him as a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America. It is a story darkened by the long shadow of global tragedies—the Armenian genocide, war in the Middle East, the specter of homophobia. With masterful attention to rhyme and meter, these poems also carefully witness the most intimate encounters: the awkward distance between mother and son getting ready in the morning, the delicate balance of power between lovers, a tense exchange with the morality police in Iran.

In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars—but, reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of Davoudian’s magical, ruminative poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, a home for the speaker, who is unable to return to it in life.

About the Author

Armen Davoudian has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry magazine, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the Frost Place Competition. Armen grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and lives in California.