Golden Armor: A book review by Kashiana Singh
Golden Armor (Transcendent Zero Press, 2025), a poetry collection by Armenida Qyqja
In the editorial framing of this collection, the image of Pallas Athena, born fully formed and war-ready from the head of Zeus, serves as an entry point for understanding the emotional and symbolic registers of Golden Armor.
Athena’s parthenogenetic birth, armored and incandescent, offers a mythic prototype: the woman who emerges not from softness, but from rupture; not from the maternal body, but from the site of thought, strategy, and conflict. The editorial note invokes Gustav Klimt’s 1898 painting of Athena, gilded in her armor, to foreground how femininity here is not mere ornament—rather, it is forged as shield, intellect, and weapon.
This comparison is not ornamental. It is instructive.
Qyqja’s poems wear their armor the way Athena does—radiant, declarative, and unflinching.
Golden Armor is a collection of poems steeped in the tensions between intimacy and societal collapse. Its speaker moves through landscapes ravaged not only by war and political disillusionment, but by the quieter, enduring devastations of isolation, longing, and digital-era spiritual starvation.
The opening poem, “Mercenaries of chaos,” situates us in the contemporary battlefield of ideological rot—where distraction, consumption, and curated personas replace the substance of interior life. Qyqja does not indict gently; she interrogates the psychic numbness of a generation more fluent in performance than presence.
Yet, this is not a collection that merely critiques.
What is striking throughout is the deeplyhuman voice of the poems – vulnerable, yearning, bruised, but still capable of tenderness.
In “Endlessly,” love becomes a choreography remembered in absence; in “Now that I have you,” the speaker discards the artifacts of self-neglect as love becomes a new mirror; in “Somewhere, near the heart,” distance becomes both prison and pulse.
Across the pages, imagery of waiting, memory, and the body recur, suggesting that the armor Qyqja writes of is not just defense, but a vessel: something to withstand the storms of longing, grief, and identity.
The editorial comments describe Qyqja’s work as “a remarkable act in literary citizenship.” This is particularly apt: these poems do not live in isolation from the world. They are aware—deeply aware—of geopolitical pain, cultural fragmentation, and the commodification of emotion. The poems insist that to feel deeply is a form of resistance. Remembering is resistance. To love fiercely and without apology is the clearest form of survival.
In “When you shall arrive,” the crows consume weakness before the beloved comes to resurrect the self. It is not a poem of surrender—it is a poem of cleansing. The internal battle is as epic as any mythic field.
Athena’s armor, then, is not a distant symbol, but it is the very skin of the speaker. The collection earns its title.
Golden Armor is a book for those who know what it means to endure longing.For those who have held themselves together through wars seen and unseen. Qyqja offers not just poems, but testimony.
Here is a couplet I was inspired to write, distilled from this collection’s ache:
And since the world won’t let our bodies meet,
we learn to hold each other in the smallest things.
Kashiana Singh serves as the Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News and is the president of the North Carolina Poetry Society. She is the author of Crushed Anthills (Yavanika Press, 2020) and Woman by the Door (Apprentice House, 2022). Her work has been featured in several publications, including Poets Reading the News, Rattle Poetry, Visual Verse, Oddball Magazine, Turnpike Magazine, Inverse Journal, Counter-Currents, and others. She was recently appointed as a council member for the Literary Arts Society for the Women’s Indian Chamber of Commerce and industry.
