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. In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars, but reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of the book’s twenty poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, the image of a lost home.
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