Decoding the Hill of Dead Kings by Alex Vartan Gubbins

A vivid portrait of trying to find home when two places are calling.

In Decoding the Hill of Dead Kings, Alex Vartan Gubbins paints a stunning portrait of a life lived between his two homelands: Michigan and Armenia. Written primarily in English with some poems in Armenian, this collection combines elegy and lyric across prose and open forms to shed light on the conundrum of diaspora—feeling rooted here, there, and in neither place entirely. Crossing the boundaries of space and time, Gubbins probes and unsettles notions of legacy, family, diaspora, geopolitical borders, and narratives of power. The ebb and flow of sadness and longing, paralleled by an unshakeable spirit, ultimately settles within these poems as hope and wonder at existing in the everyday.

Praise for the Book

“Gubbins artfully weaves strands of ancient and recent history into his observations about contemporary Armenia, writing of an area near the Turkish border” — Publisher’s Weekly

“Alex Vartan Gubbins delivers lyrical postcards of pain and perplexity from a land and people overlooked by history. Its literature remains untranslated, its songs dismissed, its cities trampled by geopolitical demigods. This is why we need the poet: to disturb our indifference and draw us into unsettling voices.” — Shahé Mankerian, author of History of Forgetfulness

“Alex Vartan Gubbins invites us on a pilgrimage of longing and desire, across destination and time where the present and the past are bound with the ephemeral, while reminding us that despite our tumultuous histories, we are capable of building a world of tenderness that leads to ‘a doorway of blessings.’” ― Abayomi Animashaun, author of Seahorses and The Giving of Pears

“Listening is an art form in Alex Vartan Gubbins’s debut collection of poetry. His city is Yerevan, and he describes ‘drunk sentences of Armenian mixed with Russian’ and how death is ever present. ‘Funeral in Javakhq’ tells us what death is like: ‘spring, and a sensible rain turns to snow.’ There is a mime of a kneeling man who ‘speaks to the grave, waits for an answer.’ We do not hear the words. There is a duduk player whose ‘diatonic climbs a valve/opening into the lands of a widowed empress.’ And the poet, like the last Soviet spy who has not returned to Moscow, determines the worth of ‘these headstones, these painted portraits looking at us / throughout the service.’ Gubbins gives us ‘the duduk’s grievous catharsis.’ The lyrical quality of ‘The Dead Grenade’ is like the moon and ‘how it scratches / our eyes.’ His poetry crawls beneath your skin, and you read on because you are compelled to see where the poet takes you: He demonstrates how to open a pomegranate and ‘choose blackening reds / stuck to the hive-like pulp.’ It is an erotic moment that evokes D. H. Lawrence. He plucks ‘them one by one,’ in this human act of ‘sucking cool / between teeth.’” ― Russell Thorburn, author of Somewhere We’ll Leave the World (Wayne State University Press)

Alex Vartan Gubbins teaches at the American University of Armenia. A native Chicagoan, he now splits his time between the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Yerevan, Armenia. His poems can be found in And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917–2017, and North American Review.

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The opinions expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and do not represent an official position of the International Armenian Literary Alliance.