Syria Is in the World

Ara Shirinyan

Poetry | 2007 | 104 pages | $15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9789262-0-5

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“At globalizing his art, Ara Shirinyan beats Walt Disney hands down. In this dazzling debut, Shirinyan takes post-conceptual poetics to new borders beyond the scope of US pop culture and media, and into the purloined hills and desserts of any language as English, as fodder for reframing: “vulgar ideas, cultural purity, nation, etc.” This is a terrain where “striktly confidentially” gulags share the global stage with a long list of Soviet poet blurbs. In the end, Shirinyan reminds us: “You have an interest in history. You cannot miss Syria. Syria has monuments.” Indeed, Syria is in the World, and so is Ara Shirinyan… welcome aboard!”

— Robert Fitterman

“An investigative poetic excavation of nationalism and its many guises, Syria Is in the World is a work thick with political history flung through the filter of poetic perspicacity and linguistic audacity. Smart, snappy, and incisive, this book is a joyride of re-appropriated language, an unflagging examination of flags, a procedurally constrained yet unfettered gambit. Ara Shirinyan presses us to question the mundane, often arbitrary borders that separate countries from each other and us from us.”

— Jules Boykoff

“What is the shape of the sound as it transcends the rectilinearity of official language? Does it mask out the hard angles or does it ooze beneath and compromise the structure itself?

. . . isosceles overlapping excess of limit
dove, anger-frames
white man equality rectangle
consent system arms covering small flag tree . . .

What voice can escape the intense entropy in which “a medal is arrogantly shaped like a medal”? It’s a voice calling a country a “perpetual country on my back.” With humor and humanity, Ara Shirinyan writes his way through power’s symbols, so that:

All possible individual personalities in human beings hold
in possession one more than one areas set aside . . .”

— Diane Ward