Features a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself. This book recounts the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
from "Ozone Journal" Bach's cantata in B-flat minor in the cassette,
we lounged under the greenhouse-sky, the UVBs hacking
> between an oboe and a bassoon
at the river's edge under cover--
> there was something on the other side of the river,
> radical bonds were broken, history became science.
> 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.
