About the Book
A descendent of Armenian genocide survivors on her mother's side, Simon Fraser University professor Celeste Nazeli Snowber explores the relationship between longing, belonging, and identity. In The Marrow of Longing, her third book of poetry, Snowber traces her own aches of heart, intergenerational trauma, yearnings of body and the lessons learned in kitchen conversations to uncover universal themes and, in doing so, she effectively leads readers to discover what has shaped their own lives.
The inherited trauma of the Armenian genocide marked Snowber's childhood. Her poems express both the sense of loss which that event created within the culture and the counterbalancing satisfaction of being a survivor and witness. In reflecting on her own childhood, The Marrow of Longing explores universal experiences: fragmented memories of grandparents, parents' love letters, prayers in the night, cooking in the kitchen, and relationship to place. "Fragments can hold a world," says Snowber.
Snowber's work is always both deeply personal and deeply interpersonal. In excavating her own vulnerabilities and longings she invites the reader into a community of reflection. "look beneath the surface / how many dimensions/ one object, one heart holds.
"Motherhood is a recurring theme within The Marrow of Longing. Snowber recalls the lessons learned in kitchen conversations with her mother: the biographical details, the recipes of the old country, the wisdom of the ancestors. "My mother had an / eggplant soul / a beauty of both / dark and light / rough and tender...the meeting of art and life / just beneath the skin of plum black."
In other poems, Snowber speaks directly to her ancestral homeland as a living entity, "I am letting you / wash over me Armenia / stone to stone /kachkar to kachkar, / lavash to lavash/ ... dance my olive skin / on your baptized land."
About the Author :
Celeste Nazeli Snowber, PhD is a dancer, poet, writer, award-winning educator and Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Celeste creates site-specific performance and has been the Artist in Residence in the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden creating full-length performances connecting poetry and dance out of each season. Celeste also creates one-woman shows integrating voice, comedy, and dance and has performed across North America and Internationally in a variety of venues, including concerts, galleries, museums, conferences and outdoor spaces. Celeste's mother was born in Historic Armenia in 1912 before immigrating to Boston and integral to Celeste's own artistic process is excavating fragments of ancestral memory, which find their way in poems and dances. She can be found at www.celestesnowber.com Boston-based artist and MFA, Marsha Nouritza Odabashian's drawings and paintings uniquely reflect the tension and expansiveness of being raised in dual cultures, Armenian and American. As a young child, she watched her mother cultivate the Armenian tradition of dyeing eggs red by boiling them in onion skins. In her work, vignettes of current events, history and social justice emerge from the onionskin dye on paper, stretched canvas or compressed cellulose sponge. Odabashian studies early and medieval Armenian art and architecture at Tufts University with Professor Christina Maranci, with whom she traveled to Aght'amar and Ani in Historic Armenia. Pairing her ancestral past with the present in her art is her means of fulfillment. She can be found at www.marshaodabashian.com.
Review :
Celeste Snowber is a creative dynamo encompassing music
and dance into her poetry in such a way that it echoes with a
a myriad of emotions reflecting like a mirror in which we can
see our own heart and soul. The Marrow of Longing is a
gentle generational walk down a highway of smiles and tears
that weaves us into Snowber's blanket of lyric and dance that
permeate the fabric of relationships and life. The words and
emotions in this mix of free verse and prose poetry dance
with eloquent ease to the surreal symphony they evoke in the
reader's mind.
Candice James, Poet Laureate Emerita,
New Westminster, BC and author of Rithimus Aeternam
Harrowing, beautiful and surprising...through her exquisite
capacity to listen, Celeste shows us person & place, land &
love, all that is treasured beyond time, can be discovered
within the living heart. It is clear to me that these poems are
made with the soles of her bare feet, listening.
John Fox
The Healing Art of Poem-Making
I savored this volume with its carefully constructed fragments
about identity, food and longing, all of them representations
of love and wisdom. A morsel of joy.
Lola Koundakjian
Author of The Moon in the Cusp of My Hand
In this period of tremendous loss for the Armenian nation,
it's good to see that our artists continue to so carefully share
our complex and unresolved history through their personal
journeys.
Atom Egoyan, Film Director, Writer, Producer
Celeste Snowber's The Marrow of Longing is a liminal
site where land, food, bodysoul, the domestic, and the wild
intermesh. These poems celebrate the succulent riches of
Armenian cuisine in a tradition where food-making and
artmaking are one, the kitchen a studio holding an eggplant's
"plum black" richness. Readers are invited to open hearts
and minds to the intergenerational traumas of the Armenian
genocide of 1915 while stepping into a world where an
Armenian mother's sweeping of floors sweeps us into an ever
present, enduring love.
Susan McCaslin, Author of Into the Open:
Poems New & Selected
Here, held in the warm love of the familial kitchen and the
embrace of earth longing, you can taste beneath the skin of
black plum, experience sticky bursts of knowing dancing
on your lips, and hear the grace in mother's admonishment
of "Do it again, sweep the floor with love." Be swept into
Snowber's embrace as she wraps you in voices, echoes and
sighs, journeying us through heart and earth healings. While
these poems share Snowber's cultural memory fragments,
her words echo universal themes bringing us back to
ourselves into the generational embodied cycle of mother,
child, mother earth, child, repeating. We are reminded that
love is created in making, through birthing, and Snowber
generates love in the recursive process of helping us
remember. Read and be reborn.
Pauline Sameshima, Canada Research Chair,
Poet and Artist
