SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 4:00 p.m.
POETRY READING at Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts
PETER BALAKIAN
Please join us for a poetry reading by Peter Balakian who will read from Ziggurat, Phoenix Poets Series from University of Chicago Press, September 2010.
Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts
2904 College Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94705
510-704-8222
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.
“Peter Balakian’s new book Ziggurat ingests calamity and dissolves it into almost exhilarating rhythm and image, pushing the language until it feels like it’s breaking into something new. The work aims to reveal the human capacity to integrate and, after hard passage, transcend.” —Sven Birkerts
Peter Balakian is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor in Humanities and professor of English at Colgate University. He is the author of five books of poems and three prose works, including The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and American’s Response, a New York Times best seller; and Black Dog of Fate, a memoir, winner of the PEN/Albrand Prize.