In Armenida Qyqja's Golden Armor, we find poems of lyric exile commingled with those of war and witness-love poems to the beloved other, to a lost nation, to the speaker's soul-all conceived in refutation of "the unsatiated hunger of silence." This collection, originally written in Qyqja's native Albanian and translated into English by the poet herself, is one woman's grappling with the desperation and suffering of the refugee, in conversation with a relentless hope. Underpinned by both her strength and her compassion, these poems offer us as readers, not helplessness in the face of the world's brutality, but the transcendence of the human spirit. -Robin Davidson Houston Poet Laureate (2015-2017) & author of Mrs. Schmetterling
Armenida Qyqja's poetry is filled with a painful urgency and quiet resistance, she excels at compressing existential reflection into tense rhythms, weaving together emotion and philosophical inquiry, navigating themes of personal trauma and collective struggle, and the Sisyphus-like search for meaning in an chaotic world.
-Ma Yongbo, Ph.D representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry
With a voice as taut and tensile as a bridge-cable, Armenida Qyqja dares to speak the simplest declaratives about those fearful complexities loneliness, "longingness," living in times of war, repression, and genocide-not to mention the greatest complexity of all (and the hardest one to write about simply and clearly): one human heart's love for another. Don't mistake Qyqja's directness, or her evocation of minutiae like holding hands or listening to the rain, for anything like reductive, easy thinking. This is the real stuff!
-Ryan Guth author of Home Truths and Body and Soul
The entire trajectory of the words in the book replays the inner voice of the human, attacked by the destructive nature of existence exposed through wars, hatred, emptiness, absurdity, and the fatality of life. Nevertheless, the author does not kneel to all these challenges stipulated by life's nature but stands up to overcome them all through longing for the voice of love and survival, as the mythological Greek king Sisyphus stands against fate through his relentless attempts admired throughout the centuries.
-Inga Zhghenti Professor of English at DeVry University and Fulbright scholar
