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.
Prize-winning poet and New York Times-bestselling author Peter Balakian offers the best of his previous poetry, as well as thirteen new po...
In this critical study of Theodore Roethke's poetry, Peter Balakian treats the evolution of the poet's work from his first book, Open House (1941), to his last, The Far Field (1964). Balakian argues that Roethke was among the most innovative poets of his time and that The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) brought America to a new frontier in the contemporary era. Balakian maintains that Roethke combined and furthered major traditions in English and American poetry -- the formal poetics and meditative sensibility of British metaphysical and Romantic poetry, the American visionary tradition,...
In this critical study of Theodore Roethke's poetry, Peter Balakian treats the evolution of the poet's work from his first book, Open House (1941),...
Siamanto (1875-1915), one of the most important Armenian poets of the twentieth-century, was among the Armenian intellectuals executed by the Turkish government at the onset of the genocide during the first decade of the century. Available for the first time in English translation, his Bloody News from My Friend depicts the atrocities committed by the Ottoman Turkish government against its Armenian population.
The cycle of twelve poems bears the imprint of genocide in a language that is raw and blunt; it often eschews metaphor and symbol for more stark representation. Siamanto...
Siamanto (1875-1915), one of the most important Armenian poets of the twentieth-century, was among the Armenian intellectuals executed by the Turki...
Originally published in 1918, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story is one of the most insightful and compelling accounts of what became a recurring horror during the twentieth century: ethnic cleansing and genocide. While he served as the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1916, Henry Morgenthau witnessed the rise of a new nationalism in Turkey, one that declared Turkey for the Turks. He grew alarmed as he received reports from missionaries and consuls in the interior of Turkey that described the deportation and massacre of the Armenians, The ambassador beseeched...
Originally published in 1918, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story is one of the most insightful and compelling accounts of what became a recurring horror du...
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...
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...
from "Ozone Journal" Bach's cantata in B-flat minor in the cassette, we lounged under the greenhouse-sky, the UVBs hacking at the acids and oxides and then I could hear the difference between an oboe and a bassoon at the river's edge under cover-- trees breathed in our respiration; there was something on the other side of the river, something both of us were itching toward-- radical bonds were broken, history became science. We were never the same. The title poem of Peter Balakian's Ozone Journal is a sequence of fifty-four...
from "Ozone Journal" Bach's cantata in B-flat minor in the cassette, we lounged under the greenhouse-sky, the UVBs hacking at the...
Peter Balakian is a renowned poet, scholar, and memoirist; but his work as an essayist often prefigures and illuminates all three. "I think of vise and shadow as two dimensions of the lyric (literary and visual) imagination," he writes in the preface to this collection, which brings together essayistic writings produced over the course of twenty-five years. Vise, "as in grabbing and holding with pressure," but also in the sense of the vise-grip of the imagination, which can yield both clarity and knowledge. Consider the vise-grip of some of the poems of our best lyric poets, how...
Peter Balakian is a renowned poet, scholar, and memoirist; but his work as an essayist often prefigures and illuminates all three. "I think of vise...
