No Sign
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
New poetry collection from Peter Balakian, author of Ozone Journal, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
In these poems, Peter Balakian wrestles with national and global cultural and political realities, including challenges for the human species amid planetary transmutation and the impact of mass violence on the self and culture. At the collection’s heart is “No Sign,” another in Balakian’s series of long-form poems, following “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy” and “Ozone Journal,” which appeared in his previous two collections. In this dialogical multi-sectioned poem, an estranged couple encounters each other, after years, on the cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades. The dialogue that ensues reveals the evolution of a kaleidoscopic memory spanning decades, reflecting on the geological history of Earth and the climate crisis, the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, the Vietnam War, a visionary encounter with the George Washington Bridge, and the enduring power of love..
Whether meditating on the sensuality of fruits and vegetables, the COVID-19 pandemic, the trauma and memory of the Armenian genocide, James Baldwin in France, or Arshile Gorky in New York City, Balakian’s layered, elliptical language, wired phrases, and shifting tempos engage both life’s harshness and beauty and define his inventive and distinctive style.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer-winning poet Balakian (Ozone Journey) returns with a kinetic eighth book that transports the reader across borders and through memory. "What is sense memory—" he posits, "but some jolts along the mossy fibers and dendrites/ of the hippocampus— the brain is bewildered." Balakian pays witness to the cyclicality of personal and political violence, the "crosswinds" of the past and present. "2019—here—," he writes in the title poem, "again no light at end of the tunnel/ no sign." He draws from a deep well of family history: "My father left Constantinople/ in 1922 on a train in the dark snaking into Thrace/ a U-turn of collapsing latitudes." These "collapsing latitudes" are unmistakable as the poems span centuries and nations, weaving references to America, Armenia, Hiroshima, and Syria alongside writers Baldwin, Mandelstam, Hegel, and Plath. Even simple images––okra, tomato, fig––resonate with multiple histories. "Leonardo used you to make ink," he writes in "Walnut." These poems ask the question, "Can holding on to this image/ help me make sense of time?" While the answer may be no, Balakian's attempt is resplendent.
