No Sign

Pulitzer-winning poet Balakian (Ozone Journey) returns with a kinetic eighth book that transports the reader across borders and through memory. “What is sense memory—” he posits, “but some jolts along the mossy fibers and dendrites/ of the hippocampus—[...] the brain is bewildered.” Balakian pays witness to the cyclicality of personal and political violence, the “crosswinds” of the past and present. “2019—here—,” he writes in the title poem, “again no light at end of the tunnel/ no sign.” He draws from a deep well of family history: “My father left Constantinople/ in 1922 on a train in the dark snaking into Thrace/ [...] a U-turn of collapsing latitudes.” These “collapsing latitudes” are unmistakable as the poems span centuries and nations, weaving references to America, Armenia, Hiroshima, and Syria alongside writers Baldwin, Mandelstam, Hegel, and Plath. Even simple images––okra, tomato, fig––resonate with multiple histories. “Leonardo used you to make ink,” he writes in “Walnut.” These poems ask the question, “Can holding on to this image/ help me make sense of time?” While the answer may be no, Balakian’s attempt is resplendent. (Mar.)