The debut collection from Lebanese-Armenian poet, 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 braids the Armenian Genocide's long aftermath with the urgent present: Lebanon's economic collapse, the Beirut 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.
