Ziggurat Readings:
Ziggurat(Poems)
The University of Chicago Press
Publish Date September 2010

Thursday, March 3, Poetry Reading, Cornell University, in the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall. The reading is free and open to the public., 4:30 pm

March 16, Hunter College , read from his new book of poems Ziggurat and the latest edition of his memoir Black Dog of Fate at Hunter College., The reading will be held in the Faculty Dining Room, Hunter College, West Building, 8th floor. RSVP: to spevents@hunter.cuny.edu or 212-772-4007. Reading is free and open to the public, but RSVPs are required.

September 7 (Monday) : PBS News Hour, poem of the week

September 11 (Saturday): Interview with Scott Simon, Weekend Edition

February 28, 2010: Peter Balakian on 60 Minutes Battle Over History
Watch Video
The Armenians call it their holocaust - the 1915 forced deportation and massacre of more than a million Armenians by the Turks. But the Turks and our own government have refused to call it genocide.

“Peter Balakian’s new book Ziggurat ingests calamity and dissolves 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.”

“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.”