How can language retrieve memories and identities? A young man, a first-generation American, explores a true story of three generations of upheaval, migration and homecoming. Rooted in autobiography and in twentieth-century Armenian history, it is also a universal story. Capillarity explores the dark corners and bright expanses of an individual's desire to break out of historical circumstances and belong to a living society and a world. In Arto Vaun's spare, lyrical fragments, personal and collective anguish and hope are caringly exposed in a language both intimate and apart. The possibilities of a future lie in the dreams of language.
About the Author
Arto Vaun is a poet, songwriter, and musician from Cambridge, MA. He has attended Harvard and Glasgow University. His first collection, "Capillarity", was published by Carcanet Press in 2009. He has appeared twice on "The Verb" (BBC3) and his poems have been included in "The Forward Book of Poetry" (2010), "New Poetries V", "Matter 10", "Glimpse Journal", "Ararat", "Meridian", "PN Review", and other publications. He has taught at Glasgow University, the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and Mass Bay College. He is the poetry editor for Glimpse Journal and is currently completing his second collection of poetry. His new record, "The Cynthia Sessions", was released in 2013.
Reviews
"Vaun is one of those inhabitants of the world who can't seem to settle, yet knows exactly where he's from" – Glasgow Herald
"[An] ambitious first collection[...] The writing is open and spacious, swerving constantly from intensely personal details (at times it has the immediacy of diary jottings) to a larger, more ambitious range as Vaun conjures his parents' Armenian background and his own experiences of growing up in the United States" – Charles Bainbridge, Guardian
