Luisa Muradyan, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated

 

Don’t Write Mom Poems

The best writing advice I’ve ever been given
is to avoid poems about motherhood.
Too sappy. Too sentimental. I agree.
Which is why I only write poems about
myself bare-chested on a hunt,
dragging my latest kill
back to my cabin
and feasting
on what I can
only describe
as truth. No room in this cabin
for a nursery or
a metaphorical child
who sleeps when I
sleep and on waking
looks at me not as creator
but as created, singing some 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 the author biography on her website (as this is the first I’ve heard of her and her work), Muradyan is originally from Odesa, Texas, has a Ph.D. in Poetry from the University of Houston, currently lives in the United States and is also the author of American Radiance (University of Nebraska press, 2018) and the forthcoming When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027). The poems in I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated are funny and odd and sad and sharp, offering lines that bend into surreal and twisted shapes, writing on parents, family, children, the scope of war and multi-generational trauma (all of which make me completely understand how she has a collection forthcoming with YesYes Books, as her work fits perfectly with their aesthetic). “Friends,” she writes, to open the absolutely delightful “Woman Posting in Parenting Forum,” “I have come to the end of my rope. / My child has decided that he is the moon / and I cannot convince him otherwise. His entire / face a moon, not a man in the moon, but a toddler / that is the moon, and yes he does give off light / in the darkness and yes some days he pulls the ocean / current toward his body and yes I’ve noticed / that when I take him to poetry readings / or art museums everyone cannot help but stop what / they are doing and begin to draw pictures of him […].” This slim and sharp poetry collection is an assemblage of poems around the narrator’s mother, but is also so much more than that. “[…] my mother somehow knowing how to pilot,” she writes, as part of the wonderfully-propulsive and evocative “My Mother as Tom Cruise,” writing her mother’s strength through the visage of a Hollywood Blockbuster action hero, “a helicopter my mother pulling her abusive / father out of a bathtub my mother slamming / 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 Anna Veprinska’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 also so much more than that. “The missiles that fell on the village / did not directly hit my grandmother’s / childhood home,” she writes, to close the title poem, “but they were close enough. / The Russian invaders claimed they did not mean / to bomb Babyn Yar, but their shells were close enough. / My great-grandmother wasn’t that Jewish, / but she was close enough. When you ask me 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 are high-wire poems, perfectly executed with an enormous amount of risk with everything gained, and poems such as “When I Say I Am Not the Speaker of My Poems,” “I Just Need You to Understand that / Chickens Are Basically Dinosaurs,” “The Aushcwitz Exhibit Asks Me / to Rate My Experience,” and “My Mother Insists that 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 Insists that I Stop Telling / People She Was a Smuggler” begins: “You see she would only pay a guy to take some stuff / to a place. It could have been nothing but mostly / it was diamonds and furs, whatever she could get her / hands on. One time it 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 throughout these poems, referencing the war in Ukraine and the Holocaust, a backdrop to almost every word she places on each page, one against the other. Muradyan offers a sense of beauty and curiosity layered in surreality underneath a layer of humour, all of which covers, even collides with, an underlay of multi-generational grief, each and all wrapped into and around and through. These poems are smart and savage and subtle, even outlandish, as the end of the poem “Everything is Sexy” writes:

or maybe it’s just you tending to the garden
that I promised I would water and never
do and yet here you are in your gray
gym shorts and this is the summer
of cucumbers as big as my want
and I’m holding an empty salad bowl
waiting for you to come inside.