by Peter Balakian

In Peter Balakian’s new book, No Sign, the voices of a pair known to us only as He and She interrogate experiences large and small, past and present. The darting dialogue between this eerily disembodied couple, simultaneously grounded and abstract, covers war, geology, love, history, and the threat of planetary extinction. When the sun at last goes out, so of course will we — unless we manage to destroy ourselves first. Two sides of the same coin, He and She are juxtaposed against the mythic presences of Pan and the ever-shifting Gaea who reveal a world full of color and beauty despite the horrors of the past and an ominous future. Mysterious and utterly original, part time-machine, part love affair, No Sign soars at every turn, buoyed by Balakian’s singularly piercing musical line.

Peter Balakian is the author of 8 books of poems, 4 books of prose, 3 collaborative translations, and several edited books. “No Sign,” is the title poem of Balakian’s forthcoming book of poems. Ozone Journal won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Black Dog of Fate, a memoir won the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir; The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize. His collaborative translations include two books by Grigoris Balakian: Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide and The Ruins of Ani. Among his other books of prose is Vice and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Balakian is the recipient of many awards, prizes, and civic citations including the Presidential Medal from the Republic of Armenia, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, The Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance, and Diplomacy, and The Emily Clark Balch Prize for poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing at Colgate University.