A swan song is a song of departure: after a lifetime of silence, the legend goes, the mute swan breaks into song just before leaving this world for good. Armen Davoudian’ s Swan Song chronicles what it’ s like to take leave of a home, a country, a past life. In their search for a home in language, these poems combine the formal resources of English and Persian poetry, turning the immigrant’ s permanent sense of loss and rootlessness, the gay person’ s sense of alienation, into artistic assets— positions of outsiderhood from which to witness and record. Armen Davoudian’s poems and translations from Persian appear in AGNI, Narrative, The Sewanee Review , and elsewhere. His work has been supported by scholarships from Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Stanford University.