About this Event
The $20 event ticket reserves your seat and purchases a copy of NEW YORK TRILOGY! The $5 ticket reserves a seat only; you will receive a $5 voucher upon arrival to spend at the store for a purchase that night!
Walk-ins to this event are welcome but space is limited.
Hope to see you in the shop!
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An American long poem in three sections by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Peter Balakian that moves between decades of tumultuous life in New York City and explosive parts of the Middle East.
In an inventive, elliptical language, New York Trilogy explores one man’s journey from the late 1960s to the twenty-first century, as he moves through a series of experiences centered in New York City and the surrounding New Jersey Palisades. Throughout this long poem in three parts, the protagonist’s life is impacted by historical events including the Armenian Genocide, the bombing of Hiroshima, the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, the attacks of September 11th, the US war in Iraq, and the climate crisis.
Comprised of three multi-sequence poems originally included in Peter Balakian’s collections No Sign, Ozone Journal, and Ziggurat, the sections of New York Trilogy come together to form a poetry that embraces interior and aesthetic experiences, celebrates human intimacy, and bears witness to history. The historical power and psychological depth of Balakian’s work expands on the tradition of the American long poem with a lyrical narrative that weaves intimate personal moments into the vastness of shared history.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Peter Balakian is the author of 9 books of poems and 4 books of prose and 3 collaborative translations and several edited books. Ozone Journal won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and his new book of poems is New York Trilogy. His poems have appeared widely in the leading magazines and journals in English for decades. His prose books include Vice and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture; Black Dog of Fate, a memoir--- winner of the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir (a best book of the year for the New York Times, the LA Times, and Publisher’s Weekly); The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Best Seller. His collaborative translation of Grigoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide was a Washington Post book of the year. Balakian is the recipient of many awards and prizes and civic citations: the Pulitzer Prize, The Presidential Medal and the Movses Horanatsi Medal from the Republic of Armenia, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, The Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance, and Diplomacy (recipients include President Carter); and The Emily Clark Balch Prize for poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has appeared widely on national television and radio (PBS, NPR, ABC, CNN, Charlie Rose, Fresh Air, All Things Considered, 60 Minutes, etc) and his work has been translated into many languages and editions and most recently into Tamil in 2025. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English at Colgate University.
BOOK REVIEWS:
"New York Trilogy reads as the culmination of [Balakian's] life-long concern with how poetry can address—honestly, but with that complexity and beauty unique to poetry—the twin poles of human atrocity and cultural achievement; of planetary extinction and possibility. . . . Montage, fragmentation, the juggling of multiple time frames and sources, as well as variations in verse form, diction, and pacing make for some challenging reading. But ultimately, I found the book tremendously moving in its search for clarity in a life lived in full awareness of the present moment—with all its historical, cultural, geographical, and political context still attached. . . . What results is a dynamic, disturbing account of human achievement colliding periodically with the 'chthonic zigzag of hubris'. Excavation, building, and collapse recur throughout, sources of both beauty and horror. Balakian’s diction sometimes veers into technical, numerical, even algebraic language."
— Consequence Forum
"[A] single personal epic. . . . Balakian, like many in his generation of 'witness' poets (Carolyn Forché, Lawrence Joseph), splits the difference between poetry’s compression and journalism’s immediacy . . . The operational mode is the collage, a series of images and phrases, akin to montage in film; the language, we might say, is 'clipped.' And as in journalism, the poet reports with little editorializing, letting the images speak for themselves."
— New York Review of Books
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Asbury Book Cooperative, 644A Cookman Avenue, Asbury Park, United States
USD 7.18 to USD 23.18
