Falling Deeply Into America

by Gregory Djanikian

Djanikian, Gregory D.

79 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1989

About the author

Born in Alexandria, Egypt of Armenian parentage, Gregory Djanikian came to the United States when he was 8 years old and spent his boyhood in Williamsport, PA. He is a graduate of the Syracuse University writing program and is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania where he was an undergraduate. He is the author of six collections of poetry, The Man in the Middle, Falling Deeply into America, About Distance, Years Later, So I Will Till the Ground, and, most recently, Dear Gravity. He has been awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, two prizes from Poetry magazine (the Eunice Tietjens Prize, and Friends of Literature Prize), the Anahid Literary Award from the Armenian Center at Columbia University, and multiple residencies at Yaddo.
His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Knopf), Seriously Funny (Georgia), Becoming Americas: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America), Poem in Your Pocket (The Academy of American Poets), Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (Norton), 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House), among others.

He lives outside of Philadelphia, PA with his wife, artist Alysa Bennett.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Djanikian's book of poems has a fine start, but seems ultiamtely misleading. The first section of poems revolve around a childhood experience in Egypt and the promise of and finally journey to America. Later poems in this book are good, but this trend falls away pretty quickly. I wasn't expecting the book to be thematic, but with such a clear theme to the first section, the later poems felt overly loose in their organization. If they're supposed to reflect on the idea of the title, they felt weak in that supposition, so perhaps a smattering of childhood and travel poems throughout the book rather than clumped together at the beginning would have ultimately proved less distracting.

[Julie Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these poems. He uses so many descriptions and they have so much imagery for the senses. When I First Saw Snow is really good