Perla Kantarjian’s Debut Novel Turns Genocide and Present-Day Collapse Into a Single Landscape

“You Must Become Field” is a Debut that Moves with Astonishing Fluidity between English, Armenian, and Arabic to braid the 1915 Armenian Genocide with Contemporary Catastrophe— Lebanon’s Revolutions and Collapses, Artsakh’s Ethnic Ceansing, Airstrikes over Beirut

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 weaponized 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.

“A bold and unapologetic reckoning,” said Anthony Anaxagorou, author of “Heritage Aesthetics” and “After the Formalities.”

“An urgent and necessary new voice for our times,” said Marjorie Lotfi, author of “The Wrong Person to Ask.”

“I was immediately captivated by the risks this author took with language. Lyrical and meditative, it also turns away from familiar constructions. I absolutely love Perla’s work,” said Alycia Pirmohamed, author of “Another Way to Split Water.”

Perla Kantarjian is a Lebanese-Armenian writer whose work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Wasafiri, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been recognized by the National Poetry Competition, Bridport Prize, and other international awards, and one of her poems was selected for the Lunar Codex project and archived on the Moon. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she was the 2021–22 Sonny Mehta Scholar. A former journalist and editor at Annahar newspaper, she currently serves on the editorial team of Rusted Radishes. Raised speaking Armenian and Arabic, she writes in English.

“You Must Become Field” is now available for purchase from its publisher Bad Betty Press, selected bookstores across the UK and online retailers worldwide. Kantarjian is a featured guest in the Literary Lights 2026 reading series this year.