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Ozone Journal
"A sequel of sorts to "Ziggurat," published in the Phoenix Poets series in 2010, the title poem from "Ozone Journal" recounts the memory of the speaker's excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a TV journalist crew in 2009. The speaker "dreams back," as it were, to the 1980s, when, as a young man in his thirties and caring for a young daughter after a recent divorce, he is having to juggle both personal and cultural/historical complexities living as a single parent in Manhattan. The poems create a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience, with the speaker struggling with the nature of memory as the poems move constantly back and forth to the Syrian desert, the dissolution of his marriage, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS, and encounters with famous jazz producers at Columbia Records to discuss music. In this book, Peter Balakian aims at the bigger picture of humanity's history of atrocity and trauma, but through short vignettes grounded in everyday situations, and in particular times and places"--Publisher's info.
Black Dog of Fate
A prize-winning poet explores the Armenian past that haunted his family's American identity--dark secrets marked by the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians in 1915.
Ziggurat
In his first book of poems since his highly acclaimed June-tree, Peter Balakian continues to define himself as one of the most distinctive voices of his generation. Exploring history, self, and imagination, as well as his ongoing concerns with catastrophe and trauma, many of Balakian’s new poems wrestle with the aftermath and reverberations of 9/11. Whether reliving the building of the World Trade Towers in the inventive forty-three-section poem that anchors the book, walking the ruins of the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo, meditating on Andy Warhol’s silk screens, or considering the confluence of music, language, and memory, Balakian continues his meditations on history, as well as on the harshness and beauty of contemporary life, that his readers have enjoyed over the years. In sensual, layered, and sometimes elliptical language, Balakian in Ziggurat explores absence, war, love, and art in a new age of American uncertainty.
No Sign
"Peter Balakian's "No Sign," the centerpiece of this book, is the third multi-sequenced long poem in a trilogy begun in "A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy" (2010) and "Ozone Journal" (2015). The three poems follow a persona whose journey is informed by a series of experiences set in New York and the surrounding Jersey Cliffs from the 1970s to the present. In the mix of a dialogue between two lovers over decades, reminiscent of an eclogue updated via the film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), we see an evolution of kaleidoscopic memory-from the haunted history of the Armenian Genocide to the AIDS epidemic, to climate change and the erosion of the planet-that gives the trilogy a unique historical power and psy...
Vise and Shadow
In Vise and Shadow, the critically acclaimed poet and memoirist Peter Balakian brings together his most influential essays of the past twenty-five years. He argues that the force of the lyric imagination is able to hold experience under pressure like a vise, while it also shadows history. Precise, lyrical, and eloquent, Balakian's essays explore the ways poetry engages disaster and ingests mass violence without succumbing to the didactic. He gives us new insights into the relationships between trauma, memory, and aesthetic form; his essays on major Armenian voices and the aftermath of genocide are a fresh contribution to contemporary literature and art. Other essays engage painting, collage, song lyrics, and film as forms of enduring lyric knowledge. With a range that includes W. B. Yeats, YeghisheCharents, Joan Didion, Hart Crane, Primo Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, Arshile Gorky, and Adrienne Rich, Vise and Shadow offers a cosmopolitan vision of the power and resilience of the human imagination.
Black Dog of Fate
"His visions are burning -- his poetry heartbreaking," wrote Elie Wiesel of American poet Peter Balakian. Now, in elegant prose, the prize-winning poet who James Dickey called "an extraordinary talent" has written a compelling memoir about growing up American in a family that was haunted by a past too fraught with terror to be spoken of openly. Black Dog of Fate is set in the affluent New Jersey suburbs where Balakian -- the firstborn son of his generation -- grew up in a close, extended family. At the center of what was a quintessential American baby boom childhood lay the dark specter of a trauma his forebears had experienced -- the Ottoman Turkish government's extermination of more than a...
The Burning Tigris
A New York Times bestseller, The Burning Tigris is “a vivid and comprehensive account” (Los Angeles Times) of the Armenian Genocide and America’s response. Award-winning, critically acclaimed author Peter Balakian presents a riveting narrative of the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s and of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Using rarely seen archival documents and remarkable first-person accounts, Balakian presents the chilling history of how the Turkish government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. And in the telling, he resurrects an extraordinary lost chapter of American history. Awarded the Raphael Lemkin Priz...
June-tree
Prize-winning poet and New York Times-bestselling author Peter Balakian offers the best of his previous poetry, as well as thirteen new poems. For three decades, Peter Balakian's poetry has been praised widely in the United States and abroad. He has created a unique voice in American poetry -- one that is both personal and cosmopolitan. In sensuous, elliptical language, Balakian offers a textured poetry that is beautiful and haunting as it envelops an American grain, the reverberations of the Armenian Genocide, and the wired, discordant realities of contemporary life.
Ambassador Morgenthau's Story
This edition brings back into print the classic memoir by the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who not only documented but also tried to stop the genocide of the Armenian people.
Armenian Golgotha
On April 24, 1915, Grigoris Balakian was arrested along with some 250 other leaders of Constantinople’s Armenian community. It was the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s systematic attempt to eliminate the Armenian people from Turkey—a campaign that continued through World War I and the fall of the empire. Over the next four years, Balakian would bear witness to a seemingly endless caravan of blood, surviving to recount his miraculous escape and expose the atrocities that led to over a million deaths. Armenian Golgotha is Balakian’s devastating eyewitness account—a haunting reminder of the first modern genocide and a controversial historical document that is destined to become a classic of survivor literature.
