I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated, SMU Bridwell Press, Project Poetica
I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated evokes love, grief, hope and longing across generations, continents, and devastation in Ukraine. Midwest grocery stores, Tony Soprano, murderous internet moms, Soviet scientists, and the Cheesecake Factory populate these poems, as Muradyan brilliantly uses humor to contend with what it means to mother one’s children amid immense loss.
I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated is at once a sidesplitting comedy special and a reverent poetry of witness. In this remarkable second collection, Muradyan renders humor an amplifier, obliging us to hear laughter as clearly as we hear an entire world’s weeping.
Praise for I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated:
I loved Luisa Muradyan's debut, American Radiance, so I was curious, naturally, what her second book might bring. Muradyan doesn't disappoint: I Make Jokes When I'm Devastated is chockfull of poems that are bursting with love and human endurance. "Don't write Mom poems," she tells us, and then proceeds to make a collection on terrors, mysteries and delights of being a mother (and daughter) -- one of the best books on familial linkages you will ever read. And, how fun it is! She has a special talent for tone, diction. But what at the first glance might be considered humor soon makes itself known as something more: a life giving vigor. Writing about the adventures (and troubles) of her immigrant family, she teaches us the wisdom of going one note higher: "I turn / this catastrophe into a little poem," she says, "I am shoving fistfuls of air / into my lungs like a baloon artist / bending a long appendage into the shape of joy." This is a book of poems to live with, one in which life and art blend together--something you might want to share with your own mothers, or children.
--Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
Luisa Muradyan announces, “I am a Jell-o mold/ floating in a sea of jellyfish,” in her witty collection I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated. In poem after poem, she plucks pop culture, family, and empire off the vine and molds them until they are suspended in her brilliant poems. With her comic and ravenous imagination she is well on her way to becoming the Gilda Radner of American poetry.
--Tomás Q. Morín
author of Machete
Luisa Muradyan’s newest book is full of humor and heart and a wickedly quick intelligence. These poems range from topics like family to place to gender, but no matter the subject the sorrows disguise themselves as jokes, the tension between languages and identities turns punchlines inside out. These poems are unpredictable in the best ways, astonishing in each turn. I never see the endings coming. Muradyan is a master of tone and can get you laughing and weeping within a few lines. My heart stretches to the corners of itself in this book.
— Traci Brimhall, KS poet laureate and author of Love Prodigal
American Radiance, University of Nebraska Press
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, American Radiance, at turns funny, tragic, and haunting, reflects on the author’s experience immigrating as a child to the United States from Ukraine in 1991.
What does it mean to be an American? Luisa Muradyan doesn’t try to provide an answer. Instead, the poems in American Radiance look for a home in history, folklore, misery, laughter, language, and Prince’s outstretched hand. Colliding with the grand figures of late ’80s and early ’90s pop culture, Muradyan’s imagination pushes the reader forward, confronting the painful loss of identity that assimilation brings.
Praise for American Radiance:
“Luisa Muradyan’s playful, fresh, and tender debut collection shows how a brand-new poetry can be made from many different existing sources. . . . Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Talmud, Madame Bovary, Jalal ad-Din Rumi, and the lives of her Russian Ukrainian ancestors. . . . And we feel included too, as she constructs her innovative highways between inner and outer worlds. This is the real stuff of poetry: spontaneous, original, compassionate, and provocative—who knows, maybe the glow of her poems does testify to the stubborn persistence of an American radiance!”—Tony Hoagland, author of Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God
(Tony Hoagland 2018-03-03)
“At once historical, personal, tender, enraged, and aroused, Luisa Muradyan has arrived precisely on time in American poetry. These poems are alive, ecstatic in the earthiest divine sense, lucid where humor blurs with grief, precise when weeping breaks into song. Her force is the force of love, and her voice is unforgettable.”—Kathleen Peirce, author of Vault?
(Kathleen Peirce 2018-03-03)
“Odessa, lost city of a lost childhood. America, lost country of the now (as promised by Bruce Willis). American Radiance is about searching, and Luisa Muradyan realizes that this is what it is to pray, to allow the search to reveal an invisible world.”—Nick Flynn, author of My Feelings
(Nick Flynn 2018-04-03)
"In her vibrant debut, the Odessa of Luisa Muryadan Tannahill’s childhood is magically wedded to an America, brash and colorful as crazyquilt. These poems, brimming with wild, fanciful juxtapositions, with juicy pop allusions and joyous praise for the overlooked or the mundane, bring the wizardry of Chagall to mind, but the specter of exile, memory, and holocaust also emerge as dark threads woven into the writer’s alert and wondrous world vision. I salute this intrepid new poet’s up-to-the-minute friskiness, unfettered eroticism (“My breasts are like Aristotle and Plato / They never see eye to eye”), and quick-witted candor that make American Radiance, in all its gorgeous irreverence and reach, such an exhilarating read.
(Cyrus Cassells 2018-04-12)
“Through generous associative leaps, Muradyan turns a narrative of assimilation into a debut collection that is as playful as it is wrenching.”
“Muradyan’s poems are not only concise, but funny, drawing on a plethora of figures (Prince, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Macho Man Randy Savage) that guide us through moments that are nostalgic, bittersweet, and at times utterly heartbreaking. Muradyan’s juxtapositions are clever and surprising, and with poems like “We Were Cosmonauts” (which narrates the speaker’s journey from Moscow to the U.S., while drawing comparisons to a game of Tetris), we see her poetic range, and see how moving a collection can be when it combines humor, history, folklore, and experiences so many can relate to.”
(Review by Esteban Rodriguez in PANK)
“littered with genuinely brilliant poems. They could lure disenchanted rationalists back to poetry. They might ignite a new movement in a culture. They are wonderful.”
(Review by Annette Lapointe in New York Journal of Books)