Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead by 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.

Praise for the Book:

“A searing, stunning collection of poems! For any one of our haunting moments who is also ‘a dense container of questions.’ Jen Siraganian carries us graciously into so many overlapping realms—Armenian, Palestinian, American, and ‘on-the-seam.’ Worlds of terrible genocide and exile, but always the mysterious power of endurance and exquisite survival of love and rich presence to keep us going. So many families glisten within her own. I am forever grateful for this knock-out book.” — Naomi Shihab Nye, award-winning poet and author of Sidekick and The Tiny Journalist.

“Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead creates a stunning habitat of remembrance, lament, and unforgettable songs. These poems embroider historical narratives with fragments of personal stories that prompt a tender regard for each other and acknowledgment that our mutual care is an imperative of epic and humane proportions.” — Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems and A Beat Beyond

“What a deep and beautiful book, full of grief and hope. Jen Siraganian writes in her own idiosyncratic and generous way from the profound, hard-earned knowledge of motherhood, of displacement, of history. Her lines and images communicate thoughtfulness and care and understanding. She writes with eloquence and directness about important things in the way only poets can, with honesty and humility. This is a lovely and important collection.” — Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams and Story of a Poem

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, and she is a winner of the New Ohio Review Poetry Prize and The Writing Salon’s Jane Underwood Poetry Prize, 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. Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead is her first book.

Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead will be published by Perugia Press on September 15, 2026, and is now available for pre-order.

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.