Cool Gardens

by Serj Tankian, Sako Shahinian (Illustrator)

From Serj Tankian, lead vocalist for critically acclaimed band System of a Down, comes a striking debut poetry collection highlighting his best work of the past eight years.

Like System of a Down's platinum-selling second album, Toxicity―hailed by Rolling Stone as "a bouquet of smart rock and ardent social argument" and by SPIN as "the sound of now"―Tankian's poetic style is willfully eclectic. Sometimes introspective, sometimes direct and cutting, these poems deal with subjects as wide-ranging as euthanasia and the nature of time itself.

Featuring original artwork created by Sako Shahinian, a young Los Angeles-based artist, Cool Gardens is honest, heartfelt, and humorous―a talented artist at his uncompromising best.

Genres: Poetry, Art

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Franco Santos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Serj, mejor dedicate a componer música, por favor.

Este libro de poesía lo compré porque está escrito por Serj Tankian, el cantante de mi banda favorita (System of a Down). Serj encima tiene varios trabajos de solista que también me encantan (Elect the Dead, Imperfect Harmonies y Harakiri)... Y además está firmado.

Algunos poemas están buenos, como por ejemplo:

I live in a city of blinds,
I wake up from life,
To fall asleep in light,
Can't open my blinds to the blind.
A blind man walks his blind dog,
To the left, the right,
Just enough to sense the light
And feel the warmth.
Even flowers, plotted in soil
Take in the light and live.
The blind man ignores the day.
He is immortal.
Death, a surprise.

O:

A pen is but a pen,
When the time has come
For its retirement.
A career is but a job,
Modern indentured servitude,
If not for the challenge
And dreams.
And a day is just a
Collection of hours,
If not for that one
Sparkling, coaxing,
Loving smile on your
Face.

Pero después están estas cosas...

Every time I fart, of late,
I feel the excretory juices of my
Feces,
Squishing and squashing between my
butt cheeks,
However I have no desire to wipe
my ass, anymore.
A metaphor?

O:

Ostriches murmur in the sand,
Rhinos whine at night,
Owls growl at the night's tragic mood,
Spitting into the crevices of
The damned bastard moon.
And you baby,
you suck a good dick.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT??

[TheVampireBookworm · Rating 3 out of 5]

I must say this was a very mixed quality book for me. There were beautiful poetic pieces as well as nonsensical ramblings. Some things reminded me of songs and some just didn't flow well. The political pieces are still relevant though. I'd take it better if this was advertised as a notebook kind of literature but since it's supposed to be poetry, I didn't find it in all of the "snippets".

[Emerald Rain · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have never hated a book as much as this in my life. It is so misogynistic and narcissistic it's crazy! I read every poem just to be sure incase I was missing something but, there was not a single redeeming piece of work in here. Honestly, it belongs in the trash because garbage is written on every page.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s not quite my type of poetry. At first I didn’t like it much, but while reading I changed my mind and enjoyed it.
In some parts I sensed it like songs.
I liked the way Serj Tankian portrays social and political problems. And this book for me is a part of his activism.
His poetry perfectly fits today’s situations as well.
Also artwork, and illustrations are brilliant, liked it a lot.

[Shane · Rating 2 out of 5]

This reminds me a lot of my journals and songs from about age 15-23. That's in no way saying that Serj is an angsty teen-ager, just that it was probably very satisfying to write it and I'm sure it makes sense to him, but probably not to many others. There's a brilliant comprehensible line here and there, but much of it almost seems like automatic writing with a little bit of word play added. The closest thing I can compare it to is Burroughs. If you enjoy digging through the non-sense to get to the gems of thought, check this out. It makes good bathroom reading. OR if you're into psychedelic drugs it may also make much more sense, until you're down again that is. Long live System of a Down! Keep fighting the "good" fight Serj.

[Gharam El-Hendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

"You will live death, in your life,
If all you do with your life, is avoid death.
My goal is to stop reacting in life,
While reacting more in sports.
It is great work to strip man from his home,
Clothes, education, social circle, and job,
In order to preserve his freedom and individuality,
Giving him his own dreams,
Rather than those of society.
Life's cruelty is in its forced forfeit
of all worldly possessions
In trade for one's life.
Death should only be the reward,
The aftermath, not the focus of life.
The world lives according to death,
Rather than in accordance to life."


Very deep, has morals behind it and sometimes really weird it's funny. Just what one would anticipate from Serj.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a huge fan of Tankian’s musical talent from System of a Down and his solo project “Elect the Dead” including his features as well with multiple artists. Much like his lyrics Cool Gardens reads with passion, and an indrawn depth of variety. Euthanasia seems to be the main focus but overall if you’re a fan of his music, you’ll dig his words in raw format. The art by Sako Shahinian is grotesquely appealing and loved every stroke of his design.

Favorites
Mer
Day or Night
Mercury
Compliment
Partial Moons
Artco.
Friik
Misunderstood Rose
Child’s Mind
New Ear
Lighter
Flux

[Casper · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty damn good collection of poetry written by the frontman of System of a Down. Lots of deep, meaningful stuff here, tucked away between poems about losing his virginity or how hot this girl is. Serj certainly has a unique way with words. If you like poetry, System of a Down, or both, this is for you.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can never get enough of Serj! 💗👏

[Alyssa McNiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just like his music, Serj Tankian's poetry is just inspiring and informative .

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can I say about this tiny pocket-sized book? It's friggin great poetry! Honest and perverse.

[Aleksandr Popov · Rating 4 out of 5]

See kirjelduselt justkui oleks luule, mis kümnendi jagu lehti lisab elupuule. Kuid selgem silm, see seletab nii mõnda ja kohe selge on, et riimist rohkem elu äng ja õpetused andmas tunda. Et aeg on küps sus keevat mässu valla päästmaks ning elu kalkusele riimidega kätte maksmaks.
See pole pelgalt hingevalu rohi. Sa seda lugedes ei tuimalt kaasa minna tohi. Sa ole ärkvel, jälgi mängu, taba hetke - et täiel rinnal nautida sa saaksid luuleretke.
Ka siis kui tundub sul, et asi muutund kõneks - see täitsa selge on, et võtab kõhedaks see mõne. See pole klassika, kuid pole ka modern. See pigem hõrgus kastmes peituv argine konserv. Mis tõmbab endasse ja samas annab märku, et sisenemas oled uude luulejärku.
Süsteem on maas, ja seda lihtsalt ei saa püsti. Sa kogu raha valada võid hõrku büsti. Su oskused ja flirt ei palju maksa, kui nälja nimel minetmas oled maksa. Sest muud sul müüa pole, nii kord läinud ja nõndaks jällegi süsteem sust üle käinud.
Kuid ära kohku, võta süda rindu, jätka võitlust. Neid ridu lugedes ei tasu meelest lasta kõiksust, mis meid nii aplalt neelamas on oma rüppe, sest luulet niisama ei loeta - oled teinud hüppe!

[David Einhorn · Rating 2 out of 5]

We get it Serj. You like alliteration and rhyme. Some of these poems aren’t so bad, they just revolve around the same three topics: drugs, globalism and sex. There’s only so many ways to describe them. Creating images in my mind with words that happen to sound alike isn’t enough either. It’s hard to break down the meaning of lines like “Catching the waves of unknown oceans / not born, / harvesting the seeds of torn lullabies, in disguise.” (Misunderstood Rose, P. 50). It sounds cool, but when you break it down it the meaning feels lost. It doesn’t matter anyway. Serj would be mad that I paid taxes on the book, which probably went to funding a company that killed a small child in a third world country. God knows what he’d say about me leaving a comment on Good Reads, he’d probably tell me I don’t understand his poetry because I’m desensitized to emotion due to capitalist advertising.

[Christopher Besonen · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I found out that the main singer behind System Of A Down had some books of poetry out, I had to wake up - grab a book and see about its make-up... and what pleasantries and oddities I found inside that touched on a lot of the familiar subjects of SOAD's music and then some. Unpredictably methodic in provoking thought as you'd expect, I think there's plenty of things to be deciphered in this book for everybody to get something of it. In an age of uncertainty, I think words with true intent like we have here are detrimental for a questionable society to regain its necessary footing. I believe that the writer and I share parallels of thought and I hope this book reached out and shook someone awake, or planted a new idea - or set in motion a fresh perception, after it was read as it did for me.

[Renata · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can confess that the only reason I ever bought this poetry collection was because of the author, who is the lead singer of one of my favorite bands, System of a Down. Aside from that, there wasn't much to this collection. I don't know if it was just me, but most of these poems just went totally over my head... The only thing keeping me from giving it 1 star was that I actually liked 2 of the poems ("Businessman vs. Homeless" and "Soil"), but it probably was because those were the only 2 I understood.

[Lagoonne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Ok, honestly would not have picked this up if it weren't written by Serj Tankian. I, like many other reviewers here are fans of his music. I think I came in with expectations that this would be some lyrical genius and was immediately disappointed after the first few pages bc of the pedastal my expectations were on. I was still struggling to connect with the writing but I did listen to some audio recordings from his "Cool Gardens" album where he reads off some of the poems and I really enjoyed that. So I think I may just really not be a poetry girlie like I used to think I was 🤷‍♀️

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young poet in 2003, with versatility. His variable tempo goes better with System of a Down’s maniacal musical background and his one of a kind voice. When Serj stands alone, a cappella, it sounds like he’s trying too hard. Although he actually did go on to be a prominent activist. Very experimental stuff, this poetry. For better and worse. There are gems here, beside the cringe.

[Gary · Rating 1 out of 5]

You know what they say about your heroes? Don’t read their poetry collection.

[Emma]

Not rating just nostalgia some of the poems in this collection are incredible

[Leah Hortin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was ... intense. And interesting.

[Lilac Moon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very Serjy

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

Serj, don't quit your day job.

His poetry works in the context of SOAD, but the moment it leaves the music, it falls pathetically flat. Take for example the very first poem, a raunchy waste of space about him getting a woman to eat another woman's pussy. Serj started his collection with this on purpose; nothing else except "Compliment" reaches the same height of sexism, so he must have wanted to scare the weak-willed and those with good taste out of reading the rest. He follows that poem up with one called "A Metaphor" which revels in "poopyfartbutt" middle-school-level humor. I was tempted to be baffled, but I've seen this sort of thing too many times.

Perhaps Serj is trying to show us that the same guy who can write "Spiders" can also write bad poetry? But why would we need to be reminded of that? Either Serj is pulling our leg with these poems, or he really does think they're good. If the former, this is basically just a gag, but a waste of a gag because the jokes aren't actually funny. If the latter, he is in desperate need of an honest editor, anyone who can hold him accountable and help him learn to kill his darlings.

So many of the poems are egregious on at least one level, especially poetic immaturity, political conspiracy, and randomness of images. None of these are necessarily death knells in themselves, but together they spell disaster.

First off, Serj writes like he just discovered what alliteration is. He uses so much rhyme, alliteration, and general repetition, but it's always in such close quarters. Such tight construction is necessary in rock lyrics, where you're constrained by the verse-chorus pattern, but in poetry books you're not... so just don't. Furthermore, the abject lack of rhythm glares through these poems, at least in the way Serj read them for the audiobook. Latinate polysyllables kill any momentum the lines have, and we're left with something more bureaucratic than aesthetic. I mean, I guess that might have been what he was going for, but he's no Kafka.

Secondly, he throws around the "F" word a lot: Fascism. He accuses everyone of it: the CIA, the military, the police, the politicians; everyone he disagrees with seems to be one. I'd love to hear how he'd define it, because I genuinely don't know how he would. Also, this isn't me dog-whistling that I'm secretly a fascist; I'm just concerned when people loosely throw around words, because they start losing their meaning. Certainly the US, especially the CIA and military, have done some shady things in recent decades. I don't think you can really dispute that. But complaining about multinational corporations and billionaires gets kinda trite. It's such low hanging fruit that it's practically planted and starting to sprout. Like, we get it, we live in 2025.

Thirdly, his randomness. Now, this isn't a fault in itself; I happen to love some very random poets, especially Paul Celan and Pablo Neruda. But Serj's randomness is often undercut in some way, either by being dated references, or by the weird 'declarative passive voice' he uses. I can't think of a better way to word it; basically, most of the poems are these litanies of complaints that come across as limp when he intends them to be forceful or serious. Sometimes it's due to passive voice, other times it's due to the overly Latinate/Greek diction. Either way, it's disappointing.

The only poem I really enjoyed was one called "House of Lies." The title was a nice homonym on "House of Flies," because the rest of the poem centered on various bugs in an allegory about political oppression. Instead of the obvious, on-the-nose politics of the rest of the collection, this one was a bit more opaque in its allegory, which worked to its favor. The use of bugs gave an extra layer of humor and distance which gave us room to breathe, rather than feeling like we're being talked down to. Overall, it seems Serj couldn't trust us to get a nuanced interpretation from his work, so instead he made his moralizing ultra-explicit. The result is something which backfires badly. No one wants to be told what to think, especially by a guy who claims to be a rebellious nonconformist rockstar. The irony of such a man pontificating is too obvious to need explication.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book definitely seems like something that Serj Tankian would write.

I think my favorite part of this book is the pictures and illustrations by Sako Shahinian that were included. That being said, I was a little disappointed that Tankian himself didn't do the illustrations. I liked the very unusual typeface that was used at first, to make the book appear handwritten, but it began to bother me after reading for awhile. The lowercase g and capital N looked more like a q and u respectively and it took me awhile to get used to it. Still, the typeface and the illustrations combined really nicely in a way that made the book feel like you were almost reading a personal notebook, which I found interesting. The look and feel of the book, however, is where the second star of my rating comes from.

If I was rating this book solely on the poems, it would definitely get one star. The poems felt largely unrefined, like they were just taken from a notebook Tankian had been writing in. A lot of times they felt more like rejected song lyrics than anything else. The subject matter could be thought-provoking at times but a less-than-stellar writing style really distracted from it. Tankian can also be somewhat crass at times. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for crassness in poetry if it is used to an effect, but in this book it was just...crass.

I would have enjoyed this book more if I had read it in high school or my freshman year of college when I would have related to it more (and, honestly, it would have been more similar to my own writing style then). As it is, this book is just not my kind of poetry.

[Ashley Lynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, I just want to say that my favorite thing about this book - and the main reason I am giving it 3 stars instead of 2 - is the artwork. All artwork is done by Sako Shahinian. I recommend checking out his work.
Regarding the poetry, I am sad to say that I found a lot of it to be unrelatable. He obviously writes a lot about politics and that's not something I have any passion or interest in. However, some poems I felt went deeper and were very personal. Those I liked. An example, and probably my favorite one in the whole book, is titled "I Am My Woman."
Serj Tankian is a brilliant and talented man and I really enjoy his music and his unique singing voice, but I am thinking that he's not one of my favorite poets. However, he does have another poetry book that I happen to have downloaded on my Kindle app, and I still plan on reading that one and comparing it to this one.

[Jonathan Stemberger]

Cool Gardens
Cool Gardens is a collection of poems by Serj Tankian. Tankian is a musician and uses a lot of rhythm and rhyme in his poems. I also enjoy using these tools and was pleased to see an adult author using them to confront issues of today. Tankian uses a lot of alteration like in the poem From Words To Portraits “A shifting of polarities, to portraits, from words. He also uses hard rhyme in pieces like Duty Free Fear “Don’t torture me, the river will arise,/encompassing the earth, evil, demise,” I would like to be able to use rhyme in my own poems. His poems do not use a lot of concrete imagery, instead Tankian relies on the abstract like “Though she loves them alike,/ In her true timeless nature/ my time here is sacred, pure” in order to address larger concerns.

[Odin (josh) · Rating 5 out of 5]

now system of a down/serj tankian is my FAVORITE band/singer of ALL TIME. so when i heard that serj came out with a book of poetry(which i love and write myself) i just had to get my hands on it. i opened the book and immediatly took notice of the illustrations. they were enough for me to love this book. but anyway the poems, some whimsical, some political, and some loving in a way captured my thoughts and inspired me. im 15 and want to be writer. many of my writings are inspired by poems or songs by serj and hes just...amazing. all i can say is hes done it again. another act of genius from serj tankian.

[Sarah Paps · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I'm a fan of the author's metal band and I was curious to see what he would publish as poetry since a lot of his lyrics are obscure yet somewhat interesting... However, I stopped reading halfway through. Some of my biggest pet peeves in writing any form of literature is using women's bodies and women's lived experiences as a writing device, object or decoration, especially by someone who has not lived those experiences or is so far removed from them. The pieces The Count and Wet Flower are prime examples of that.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed a lot of the poetry here and learnt some new words along the way. Some of the poems were good, yet others were not. However, the poems I did enjoy reading made up the disapointment from the others and I rate this book a three. Among my favourites were the poems: Friik, Circus Tiger, My Words, Death and 12 Lives. As a side note, there was also some fantastic artwork in the book.

[Wild-Rogue-Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will admit that Serj has a talent for poetic imagery in his own unique way.
Sadly, like when I was in high school, and every other CD player was spinnin' a 'System of A Down' disc, it was just not my cup of tea.

On a side note, the typeface was a little hard for me to read- it might just be me, whatever.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply Amazing. Became inspired and uplifted as soon as I read it, Serj is not only one of my favorite singers from one of my favoirte bands (system of a down), but he is one of my favorite solo artists, and poets/writers/activists.