Ziggurat - 9780226035642

"Peter Balakian's new book Ziggurat ingests calamity and dissovles it into an exhilarating rhythm and image, pushing the language until it feels like it's breaking into something new. This is how idioms change, advance. The harrowing long poem `A-Train/ Ziggurat/ Elegy' jostles a range of perspectives and narratives. It is a panorama of contemporary witness, but a syncopation of the same. Balakian renders scenes and at the same time enacts the sensibility being breached and affected---9/11 is just short-hand for our new magnitudes of violence and dissociation. The frames of contemporary life, and our recent history, fit together because they have been brought to account in the self of the poet. The work aims to reveal the human capacity to integrate and, after hard passage, transcend."Sven Birkerts

"With characteristic originality, Balakian finds his echoing motif in the construction of the first great skyscraper, the Ziggurat at Ur, and this gives his epic poem, `A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy,' a historical depth I have found nowhere else in American poetry in recent years. What Balakian has achieved here is a brilliant assimilation of the historical, philosophical, political, and psychological." Carolyn Forche

"[An] intense and soulful new collection of poetry. American pop culture references---to Bob Dylan songs, cell phones and T-shirts advertising Coca-Cola---mingle eloquently with his family history, the Armenian genocide and memories of his childhood in suburban New Jersey.... June-tree is political yet idiosyncratic."Susan Shapiro, New York Times Book Review

"Balakian, a gifted poet, knows exactly how to bring the pain of the past into the landscape of the present. Passionate and endearingly personal.... An extraordinary book." Alfred Kazin

In his new book Ziggurat, 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 the harshness and beauty of contemporary life, that his readers have enjoyed over the years. In a sensual, layered, and sometimes elliptical language, Balakian in Ziggurat explores absence, war, love, and art in a new age of American uncertainty.