Luisa Muradyan, I Make Jokes When I'm Devastated, March 2025
I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated evokes love, grief, hope and longing across generations, continents, and devastation in Ukraine. Midwest grocery stores, Tony Soprano, murderous internet moms, Soviet scientists, and the Cheesecake Factory populate these poems, as Muradyan brilliantly uses humor to contend with what it means to mother one’s children in the midst of immense loss. I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated is at once a sidesplitting comedy special and a reverent poetry of witness. In this remarkable second collection, Muradyan renders humor an amplifier, obliging us to hear laughter as clearly as we hear an entire world’s weeping.