A history of the Armenian massacres of the 1890s and the genocide of 1915 also traces America's effort to assist the Armenian people, citing the contributions of such figures as Julia Ward Howe, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Mark Twain, and Clara Barton.

The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia and immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced--the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians in 1915, including many of Balakian's relatives, in the century's first genocide.
In elegant, moving prose, Black Dog of Fate charts Balakian's growth and personal awakening to the facts of his family's history and the horrifying aftermath of the Turkish government's continued campaign to cover up one of the worst crimes ever committed against humanity. In unearthing the secrets of a family's past and how they affect its present, "Black Dog of Fate gives fresh meaning to the story of what it means to be an American.

"Warhol/Electric Chair/'63": The red spreads like Christmas wrapping - the green, a field in a Caucasian rug. It's almost beautiful without the metal plates for the head (though the plug on the floor is visible). Before decorator colors & Hockney, Calvin Klein in the summery Hamptons, before there were - switches to break the flow my mother used to say never touch a radio when you're in the bathtub, never fly a kite near transmission lines. But still, it's furniture still, it's a typical American way to go - it's Sing Sing, the silhouette of Ethel Rosenberg. In the rheostatic air, the absent man heard "She Loves You", the British invasion and the flat line arrived at once. Outside Negroes were eaten by dogs. Johnson was sworn in. Cuba turned red in the green sea. 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.

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.

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 short sections, each a poem in itself, recounting the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists in 2009. These memories spark others-the dissolution of his marriage, his life as a young single parent in Manhattan in the nineties, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS-creating a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience. Bookending this sequence are shorter lyrics that span times and locations, from Nairobi to the Native American villages of New Mexico. In the dynamic, sensual language of these poems, we are reminded that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is both global and ancient; but we are reminded, too, of the beauty and richness of culture and the resilience of love.

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, and the innovations of modernism.

The early chapters of the book explore Roethke's intellectual, religious, nd psychological development and his development as a poet. Balakian discusses the influence of William Carlos Williams on Roethke's work and claims that the relationship between the two poets provided Roethke with a sense of the American grain. Later chapters treat the shift from self-absorption to union with otherness that marks Roethke's love poems, exploring the poet's development of mysticism and a poetic persona and examining the influences of Eliot and Whitman on his work. Balakian also discusses the metaphysical language necessary for Roethke's late poems and follows Roethke's spiritual progress as he prophetically faces his final work.

In presenting the evolution of Roethke's career, Balakian offers fresh and original readings of the poetry. He avoids any monolithic approach to the body of Roethke's work, employing instead various approaches to Roethke's stages of poetic evolution. Balakian makes use of the psychology of C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann, the writings of the mystics, the aesthetics of William Carlos Williams, and the myth of the American frontier. With a literary historian's concern for Roethke's place in history and a critic's eye for the sources and structures of poetry, Balakian studies the resonances of language and the inner life of this poet's craft. Theodore Roethke's Far Fields places Roethke firmly in literary and intellectual history and asserts his place as a major poet.

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 language might be put under pressure "as carbon might be put under pressure to create a diamond." And shadow, the second half of the title: both as noun, "the shaded or darker portion of the picture or view or perspective," "partial illumination and partial darkness"; and as verb, to shadow, "to trail secretly as an inseparable companion" or a "force that follows something with fidelity; to cast a dark light on something-a person, an event, an object, a form in nature." Vise and Shadow draws into conversation such disparate figures as W B Yeats, Hart Crane, Joan Didion, Primo Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, and Arshile Gorky, revealing how the lyric imagination of these artists grips experience, shadows history, and casts its own type of light, creating one of the deepest kinds of human knowledge and sober truth. In these elegantly written essays, Balakian offers a fresh way to think about how the power of poetry, art, and the lyrical imagination illuminate history, trauma, and memory.

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.