Description: "New York Trilogy is comprised of three, long, multi-sequence poems ("A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy," "Ozone Journal," and "No Sign") that first appeared in Peter Balakian's last three books with this Press: Ziggurat (2010), Ozone Journal (2015, winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and No Sign (2022). As a long poem, the trilogy explores a number of cataclysmic events of our time, including the Armenian Genocide, Hiroshima and the Vietnam War, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, conflicts in the Middle East, and the geo-climate crisis. The poems follow the journey of a persona that evolves from a series of experiences in New York in the 1970s and 80s and into the first decade of the new century. It registers both personal and historical perspectives, creating layers of memory in the form of a dialogue between past and present, self and other, exploring political violence, art and music, love, divorce, and personal loss. As a book-length work of poetry, New York Trilogy joins the tradition of American long poems that includes works such as Hart Crane's The Bridge, William Carlos Williams's Paterson, and Charles Olson's Maximus Poems. Its appearance will be a publishing event"--
Brief description:
Peter 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/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, and he teaches at Colgate University.
Review Quotes: "Rippling with large energy, ambitious in its reach, and gratifying in its etched-in personal glimpses, New York Trilogy shuttles us through history, from a dig in Mesopotamia to the catastrophes of our time. Ingesting calamity, it breaks the language into fresh syncopations. So idioms change and advance. 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."
--Sven Birkerts, author of "The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing"