NEW YORK — Pulitzer Prize winning poet Peter Balakian’s new book of poems, New York Trilogy, has just been published by the University of Chicago Press. In inventive, elliptical language, New York Trilogy is a book length poem in three sections. The long poem explores one man’s journey, from the late 1960s into the early twenty-first century, a journey that evolves from a series of experiences and events, many of which are set in New York City and the onlooking New Jersey Palisades. The life and imagination of the persona are impacted by various historical events: the Armenian Genocide, Hiroshima, the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, 9/11, the US war in Iraq, and the geo-climate crisis. Balakian’s journey to the Syrian desert with the 60 Minutes TV crew in 2009 to find the remains of Armenian Genocide survivors is a prominent segment in the poem.
The literary critic Sven Birkerts writes: “The Trilogy is a feat of contemporary witness, its multiple refractions brought to account in the self of the poet. This is how we integrate fragmentation in our time, and how, after hard passage, we look to transcend.”
Reviewing Ozone Journal in World Literature Today Keith Garibian has written: “Balakian is the preeminent Armenian writer in English today … attuned to histories of disaffection, disruption, and derangement, he is a master of collage, resulting in poetry of expansive, long sequences; a poetry of montage, fluctuating rhythm, and inner tension where motion is skillfully embedded with emotion and a refined intelligence.”
And David Wojahn in Tikkun writes, “Few American poets of the boomer generation have explored the interstices of public and personal history as deeply and urgently as has Balakian. … [He finds] within the pitiless hubbub of contemporary consciousness those essential recollections that are the sources of our truest sense of selfhood and [devises] a new method for meaningfully confronting … the past.”
Balakian is the author of nine books of poems including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ozone Journal. His memoir Black Dog of Fate won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response was a New York Times bestseller. Balakian’s work has been translated into many languages; he teaches at Colgate University.
