You Must Become Field by Perla Kantarjian

Perla Kantarjian maps the aesthetics of enduring calamity with surgical, dark feminine precision: $12 oat milk lattes ordered while the lira collapses, gel nails applied during drone strikes, the exact shade of OPI red chosen for a wartime pedicure, girls fixing each other’s eyeliner in club bathrooms between ceasefire news. She writes girlhood and nationhood as twin violences demanding the body, both met with fury cloaked in consumer gloss and devastating wit. Beneath balayage appointments and SHEIN hauls lies the calculus of inherited trauma: women’s wombs conscripted to “write back what the rifle erased,” beauty rituals and pleasure weaponised as refusal.

These poems shatter into fragments, lists, concrete shapes, essayistic sprawl, refusing to be easy, to be consumable, to let you look away. Multilingual and restless, they sound like catastrophe feels in a diaspora body: urgent, recursive, impossible to translate but desperate to be understood. This is what it means to be field and seed and what grows back wild.