You Must Become Field / Perla Kantarjian

The FCDO advises against all travel to parts of Lebanon…

I buy bread made of sesame and strange flour.
I buy a weird new fruit, chocolate cake made of pumpkin.
I buy everything because I am obsessed with life, what else can I do
here with these hands. I go to the corniche. The sky so open.
People walking. I photograph the sea. The ordinary ordinary blue.
In every frame my heart is bracing for something in the sky that isn’t a bird.
I hold the beautiful thing and the terrible thing in the same eye.
I learn that the beautiful thing is the terrible thing:
the light that is golden, the sea that is God’s,
the blue that is blue until they decide it isn’t.

The debut collection from Lebanese-Armenian poet Perla Kantarjian, You Must Become Field moves with astonishing fluidity, from the 1915 arrest of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople to a 2025 Beirut club bathroom where girls fix each other’s eyeliner between airstrikes. Kantarjian braids the Armenian Genocide’s long aftermath with the urgent present: Lebanon’s economic collapse, the Beirut Port explosion’s glass rain, Artsakh’s exodus, war in Lebanon – without flattening either into metaphor. Here is girlhood and nationhood, seedless grapes at Tesco, wedding preparations and war, all held in the same devoted attention.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OUT 24TH SEPTEMBER 2026

ISBN: (Paperback) 978-1-913268-92-3 (ePub) 978-1-913268-93-0