Luisa Muradyan, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated

 

Don’t Write Mom Poems

The best writing advice I’veever been given
is to avoid poems aboutmotherhood.
Too sappy. Too sentimental.I agree.
Which is why I only writepoems about
myself bare-chested on ahunt,
dragging my latest kill
back to my cabin
and feasting
on what I can
only describe
as truth. No room in thiscabin
for a nursery or
a metaphorical child
who sleeps when I
sleep and on waking
looks at me not ascreator
but as created, singingsome ancient
song in the moonlight.

Oh,I am very taken with Luisa Muradyan’s incredible second collection, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated (Dallas TX: Bridwell Press, 2025). According to theauthor biography on her website (as this is the first I’ve heard of her and herwork), Muradyan is originally from Odesa, Texas, has a Ph.D. in Poetry from theUniversity of Houston, currently lives in the United States and is also theauthor of American Radiance (University of Nebraska press, 2018) and theforthcoming When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027). Thepoems in I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated are funny and odd and sad andsharp, offering lines that bend into surreal and twisted shapes, writing onparents, family, children, the scope of war and multi-generational trauma (allof which make me completely understand how she has a collection forthcomingwith YesYes Books, as her work fits perfectly with their aesthetic). “Friends,”she writes, to open the absolutely delightful “Woman Posting in ParentingForum,” “I have come to the end of my rope. / My child has decided that he isthe moon / and I cannot convince him otherwise. His entire / face a moon, not aman in the moon, but a toddler / that is the moon, and yes he does give offlight / in the darkness and yes some days he pulls the ocean / current towardhis body and yes I’ve noticed / that when I take him to poetry readings / orart museums everyone cannot help but stop what / they are doing and begin todraw pictures of him […].” This slim and sharp poetry collection is anassemblage of poems around the narrator’s mother, but is also so much more thanthat. “[…] my mother somehow knowing how to pilot,” she writes, as part of thewonderfully-propulsive and evocative “My Mother as Tom Cruise,” writing hermother’s strength through the visage of a Hollywood Blockbuster action hero, “ahelicopter my mother pulling her abusive / father out of a bathtub my motherslamming / her fist down on the table during an arm / wrestling tournament […].”This collection is an assemblage of poems around the trauma of war in Ukraine,connecting to memory and trauma comparable to other recent works such as AnnaVeprinska’s Bonememory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2025)[see my review of such here] and Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), but is alsoso much more than that. “The missiles that fell on the village / did notdirectly hit my grandmother’s / childhood home,” she writes, to close the titlepoem, “but they were close enough. / The Russian invaders claimed they did notmean / to bomb Babyn Yar, but their shells were close enough. / Mygreat-grandmother wasn’t that Jewish, / but she was close enough. When you askme for / another response to tragedy, I tend to begin with a joke. Which isn’t /exactly the shape of sorrow, but I assure you, / it is close enough.” These arehigh-wire poems, perfectly executed with an enormous amount of risk witheverything gained, and poems such as “When I Say I Am Not the Speaker of MyPoems,” “I Just Need You to Understand that / Chickens Are Basically Dinosaurs,”“The Aushcwitz Exhibit Asks Me / to Rate My Experience,” and “My Mother Insiststhat I Stop Telling / People She Was a Smuggler” really need to be read to be believed,for all of their sharp, even devastating, possibilities. As “My Mother Insiststhat I Stop Telling / People She Was a Smuggler” begins: “You see she wouldonly pay a guy to take some stuff / to a place. It could have been nothing butmostly / it was diamonds and furs, whatever she could get her / hands on. One timeit was endless yards of tent material / and what could you even do with that?”There is such an articulation of the human and emotional cost of war throughoutthese poems, referencing the war in Ukraine and the Holocaust, a backdrop toalmost every word she places on each page, one against the other. Muradyanoffers a sense of beauty and curiosity layered in surreality underneath a layerof humour, all of which covers, even collides with, an underlay of multi-generationalgrief, each and all wrapped into and around and through. These poems are smartand savage and subtle, even outlandish, as the end of the poem “Everything isSexy” writes:

or maybe it’s just youtending to the garden
that I promised I wouldwater and never
do and yet here you arein your gray
gym shorts and this isthe summer
of cucumbers as big as mywant
and I’m holding an emptysalad bowl
waiting for you to comeinside.