Peter Balakian s new book of poems is a sequel of sorts to his earlier book, "Ziggurat," published in the Phoenix Poets series in 2010. The title poem, "Ozone Journal," a sequence of 54 short poems, recounts the memory of the speaker s excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a TV journalist crew in 2009. The speaker dreams back, as it were, to the 1980s, when, as a young man in his thirties and caring for a young daughter after a recent divorce, he is having to juggle the personal, historical, and cultural complexities of living as a single parent in Manhattan. The poems create a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience, with the speaker struggling with the nature of memory as the poems move constantly back and forth to the Syrian desert, the dissolution of his marriage, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS, and encounters with famous jazz producers at Columbia Records to discuss music. "Ozone Journal "thus aims at the bigger picture of humanity s history of atrocity and trauma, but through short vignettes grounded in everyday situations, and in particular times and places. The title poem is bookended with shorter lyrics that take us to different locales and eras, reminding us that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is a global and ancient phenomenon.
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