Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead

Jen Siraganian

In her debut collection, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, Jen Siraganian traces a self shaped by history, fragmentation, and memory as she weaves her family’s past in the Middle East with her identity as an Armenian-American woman and mother. Whether portraying a grandparent’s survival during the Armenian Genocide, a father’s childhood in 1940s Palestine, or a son’s birth when “death is a neighbor,” Siraganian’s poems interrogate concepts of home, origins, belonging, and displacement. Using a docupoetic lens, the poet braids narratives with archival photographs and artifacts to chart cycles of cultural and historic erasure while enacting an intertextual conversation with artists of the diaspora, and with art itself. Through poems that seed each other with recurring images of pomegranates, mushrooms, and fire, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead pushes against annihilation with a voice that resists silence.

Inheritance

I slipped from their bodies, became
another body, my DNA stained
with their unlimited loss.

Orphaned for being Armenian,
waiting for parents and siblings to wake,
hungry for someone to take them.

What does it mean to live
when others want you dead?

Two generations later, who am I to understand?

Not that they spoke of it.
No words sprung until after
a grandmother’s funeral,
when everyone thirsts
for a shared language,
stories that reside
in my sloughed skin
or a speck of saliva.
A bone-deep knowledge
of what it is to be hunted.

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Jen Siraganian

Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer, educator, and former poet laureate of Los Gatos, California. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets 2016 and 2025, The Cincinnati Review, Electric Literature, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, the anthology Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry, and elsewhere. A winner of the New Ohio Review Poetry Prize and The Writing Salon’s Jane Underwood Poetry Prize, she has received support from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Community of Writers, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She served as managing director of Litquake: San Francisco’s Literary Festival, and she is a Lucas Artist Fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California. Her work was named a finalist for the Dorset Prize, the University of Wisconsin’s Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, the Trio Award, and the Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, as well as a semifinalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Winner of the 2026 Perugia Press Prize, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead is her first book. Visit her at jensiraganian.com.