David Kherdian is proud to announce his new collection of poems, Remembering Island Park.
David says that this new book is “of a place that was central to my life as a child, created by the landscape artist, Jens Jensen, that helped me to grow truly into myself. ”
In this elegy to the place of his youth, the poems of David Kherdian reflect on the park created by Jens Jensen, the famous landscape artist, who had designed many of Racine’s landmarks, that had profoundly effected Kherdian’s childhood and youth, to find there the foundations of his art, that came much later when he was grown and could look back at influences that had guided him, none more important than Island Park and the river that flowed there, to become his abiding symbol for transformation and truth, that would characterize his life as an artist.
David Kherdian was born in Racine, Wisconsin, the site of his 13-volume Root River Cycle. In addition to his poetry, biographies, novels, and memoirs, his translations and retellings have included the Asian classic Monkey: A Journey to the West, and the soon-to-be-released 9th-century Armenian bardic epic, David of Sassoun. He has also written a narrative life of The Buddha. As an editor, he has produced two seminal anthologies: Settling America: The Ethnic Expression of 14 Contemporary American Poets, and Down at the Santa Fe Depot: 20 Fresno Poets, which inspired over 100 city and state anthologies. His biography of his mother, The Road From Home, his best-known work, has been continuously in print in various editions and 17 translations since its publication in 1979. An hour-long documentary on his poetry, by New York independent filmmaker, Jim Belleau, was released in 1997. He is married to two-time Caldecott Award winner, Nonny Hogrogian, with whom he has collaborated on a number of children’s books, and also on three journals, Ararat, Forkroads: A Journal of Ethnic-American Literature, and Stopinder: A Gurdjieff Journal for Our Time.
You can order your copy of A New Day through David’s website and Amazon.
