I began this book in the Cartel Coffee Lab in Tempe, Arizona, in the summer of 2014, two weeks into an intensive language course in Modern Eastern Armenian: my head full of the shapes of words that weren’t mine. I finished it in a bedroom in Baltimore in the high spring of 2017, too early for my wife to be awake, watching the light come in slow over the city: thinking about exile, and how a person almost but does not quite ever come home.
