“Brilliant and deft and heartfelt."—Richie Hofmann Wry, tender, and formally innovative, Armen Davoudian’s debut poetry collection, The Palace of Forty Pillars, tells the story of a self estranged from the world around him as a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America. It is a story darkened by the long shadow of global tragedies—the Armenian genocide, war in the Middle East, the specter of homophobia. With masterful attention to rhyme and meter, these poems also carefully witness the most intimate encounters: the awkward distance between mother and son getting ready in the morning, the delicate balance of power between lovers, a tense exchange with the morality police in Iran. In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars—but, reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of Davoudian’s magical, ruminative poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, a home for the speaker, who is unable to return to it in life.

This volume translates and examines a rare conspectus of architectural and decorative taste published at the very end of the eighteenth century. Baron Joseph Friedrich zu Racknitz’s pioneering Presentation and History of the Taste of the Leading Nations in Relation to the Interior Decoration of Rooms and to Architecture (Darstellung und Geschichte des Geschmacks der vorzüglichsten Völker in Beziehung auf die innere Auszierung der Zimmer und auf die Baukunst) is little known today. Racknitz, a German aristocrat, traced an early global history of design and ornament through discussions of what he distinguished as twenty-four regional historical tastes. He included a diverse group of ancient classical civilizations, European nations and peoples, Eastern civilizations, and more exotic reaches of the world. This sensitive and informed translation by Simon Swynfen Jervis includes reproductions of the original color plates and essays on Racknitz’s biography, his publication, and the deeper German Enlightenment context, making this an essential volume for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture, decorative arts, and garden design.