Review by Rebecca Jane
Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead slams the reader awake to the emotional terrain of Armenian heritage, history, family, tradition, and sensibility. This is a father’s story, with his daughter accompanying him, journeying to what might have been a “motherland.” This father, as a child, was forced to leave toys, a pet, a home to walk and walk to… genocide. He survived, only to navigate humanity’s sea of identity, as neither Jew nor Arab, from Jerusalem.
A compassionate reader must participate with full emotional engagement, to respond as a deep listener, to welcome the flow and lifeblood of these poems. Medical technology has “The purply dye Inserted Into [the]… Uterus” that helps a woman see, on a screen, what she carries inside herself. She wonders “are my fallopian tubes / roller-coaster looped or sidewalk-slick?” These poems implore perception to include then transcend clinical views of the body or textbook views of history. Siraganian is a poet whose imagery bares the fertility clinic—blink—and there are the killing fields.
Jen Siraganian’s writing has won numerous awards and recognition. She is an Armenian-American poet, educator, and mother who has published widely, and she has served as Poet Laureate in Los Gatos, California. Her list of accomplishments runs long, not to mention she has given birth. Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead won the 2026 Perugia Press Prize.
Witness the Armenian Genocide and continuing ethnic persecution. Raise your hand if your family cannot locate loved ones or grave markers of departed grandparents. Readers will find a voice that resonates with what it is like to endure social pressure to get married and then more pressure to reproduce… boys. The challenges to categorization as Armenians are neither Arab nor Jew. The silence, how difficult it is to talk about genocide, and the ways its reality gets dismissed by people who think they have never experienced the atrocity first-hand; yet it seems to be happening again and again under our noses.
Let’s focus on one wound at a time. I can only tell
A story diluted. I’ll try more softly—my father had toys,
then he didn’t. He had a childhood, then he didn’t.
Here is me at a sun-lit kitchen table in California
Doubling as American and something like coarse salt (13).
We breathe relief to know the poet feels right at home working in a restaurant that serves the flavors of the Middle East. We can relate: human pallets appreciate food tasting like home. And this is hopeful, until a man tells his grandson a refugee is someone with no home to return to. These poems carry arresting messages, just sparing despair as the mind yields to the heart’s promise of empathy. It hurts to know watching a film in school about Armenian genocide fails to really teach a lesson. So, maybe contemplating these poems offers more poignant takeaways—the generational trauma compounded by a multiplicity of inherited clashes, connections, and disasters. Maybe language becomes the only refuge? Maybe none of us ought to be so bold as to stake any land as homeland? Maybe these poems can finally get everyone to understand each other? Photos, official documents, a telegram, a Jerusalem Residents pass, a photo from a military occupation juxtaposed to poems that raise questions, evoke sad reality, and boldly attest to the fact that while genocide attempts to erase people, blood stains hands and lands, and the story is a seed planted. These poems are its fruit.
The metaphor of the pomegranate appears throughout the collection, offering shifts in perspective. It stands for blood, a bride, fertility, a hiding place, a human heart, a despot, tourism, miscarriage. Fruit, plucked from a tree, moves from hand to mouth, from symbol to symbol, crossing borders—naturally. This collection is so unsettling; we must ask ourselves: how can we build a genocide-free world so that a mother-to-be, whose labor stalls, can know more than “I know my body’s whisper: There’s nothing / safe for you out there” (63). We are a dying species: all we have now is a mother-to-be, who has inherited the wounds of genocide, welcoming her babe with words, as words have no arches. No cafés. No plazas. No bones. Welcome the babe with words carried on breath alone.
Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead by Jen Siraganian
Perugia Press, 105 pages, paper $20 USA
ISBN: 979-8996077205
Rebecca Jane is the author of She Bleeds Sestinas, which was a finalist for a Best Book Award in 2023. She is a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and poet who travels to Asia to study yoga, Sanskrit, and Mandarin. She works as a bookseller at The Feminist Bookstore and also serves as a Creative Growth Manager for Jaded Ibis Press. She lives with her daughters on unceded Kumeyaay land. (San Diego, California).