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In Birds Too Distant to Name, Alan Semerdjian writes with lyric clarity and experimental grace about love, fatherhood, memory, and the fragile beauty of contemporary life. Moving between intimate personal experiences and wider currents of history and culture, these poems of survival and inheritance search for moments of tenderness and meaning in an unsettled world and remind us that “we are nothing if not directions for each other.”
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Alan Semerdjian’s Birds Too Distant to Name reads as an eloquent and animate love poem to the self, the beloveds, and the world. Semerdjian writes from the “little aquariums that we are” and is not apologetic in these philosophical soliloquies: “If I’m wrong, then let me be wrong like the motion of a maple in November air.” These poems delight in the flight of language along with the feathered definitive “castles of concentration” that verse becomes when the poet notices “The Rising” of memory. The personal and the historical are inescapable, ever-present. Birds/poems here are crooners, but also witnesses. Read these poems, which “dive inward,” slowly, lovingly. This wonderful collection holds singular, reassuring birdsongs we often miss.
—Lory Bedikian, author of Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body, winner of the 2023 Prairie Schooner/Raz-Shumaker Prize in Poetry
“We are still alive in this impossible world,” Alan Semerdjian says in his beautifully wrought Birds Too Distant to Name, and, of course, given our merciless wars, political oppressions, our sometimes hatefulness toward each other, it may be difficult to put our faith in our continued ability to survive. And yet, the poems, again and again, make us fall in love with our lives as the language takes us in flights toward our best qualities, a delicacy of spirit, a feathery tenderness, as if we were birds, half-enamored by the ephemeral and limitless sky, and yet half-lured to the tangible earth, the right place for love, where we alight and sing.
—Gregory Djanikian, author of Nostalgia for the Future, New and Selected Poems, co-winner of the 2026 Paterson Poetry Prize
Alan Semerdjian’s wonderfully balanced poems accommodate within their lucid structures, within their geometric clarity and inevitability, a kaleidoscopic variety of natural effects—effects of feeling, pungent effects of thinking and knowing, transmutations of the imagination, shifts in scale, beautiful transitions in the syntax of the mind, and an ever-present vital energy. A rich and deeply nourishing, permanent and pertinent book.
—Vijay Seshadri, 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Birds Too Distant to Name is a remarkable philosophical lyric; a haunting collection on art and lineage, reminding us that history, like love, is both “brutal and shimmering.” The heaving music in these poems carry Semerdjian’s unique artistry of poetic memoir, casting a long shadow of Armenian familial roots, moving between the intimate and ancestral. Portraits remember the journeying generations like “ fire in the palm of the young boy’s mind,” bestowing upon readers declarations, reckonings, and reveries. Here, memory is not a static snapshot presence—it breathes, it questions, it offers itself. As one voice serenades, another begs for forgiveness, while yet another barks at war and truths. Love becomes a holy oath that repeats, repents, and surrenders—a metaphorical sepulcher, a tenderness shaped by inheritance and survival.
—Michelle Whittaker, author of Spoke the Dark Matter, 2017 NYFA Poetry Fellow
Alan Semerdjian is an award-winning writer, musician, and educator. His poems have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Poetry International, and Hanging Loose among other notable journals and anthologies. His work has been supported by Creative Armenia and an Armenian General Benevolent Union Performing Arts Grant. He received a Frontier New Poets Award in 2019 and two Pushcart prize nominations in 2021. Alan has recorded and toured all over North America in support of his critically-acclaimed music for three decades while serving as a public educator, writing poems and essays, collaborating with other artists, and founding and facilitating local and international poetry initiatives. He is the 9th Poet Laureate of New York’s Nassau County and teaches English at Herricks High School in New Hyde Park, NY.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 106 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-533-5
$18
