No Sign

"Peter Balakian's "No Sign," the centerpiece of this book, is the third multi-sequenced long poem in a trilogy begun in "A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy" (2010) and "Ozone Journal" (2015). The three poems follow a persona whose journey is informed by a series of experiences set in New York and the surrounding Jersey Cliffs from the 1970s to the present. In the mix of a dialogue between two lovers over decades, reminiscent of an eclogue updated via the film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), we see an evolution of kaleidoscopic memory-from the haunted history of the Armenian Genocide to the AIDS epidemic, to climate change and the erosion of the planet-that gives the trilogy a unique historical power and psychological depth. The poems in the trilogy are defined by inventive collage-like fragmentation and elliptical, granular language. In the tradition of the American long poem from Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to Charles Olson, Balakian has created something new, what one critic has called, "a panoramic work of contemporary witness...of an unprecedented magnitude of violence and dissociation, as well as transcendent vision." Balakian rounds out this new collection with his signature lyrics and narrative poems, where seemingly minor, personal moments in one life expand into the vastness of our messy, shared history"--