Peter Balakian awarded Pulitzer Prize in new York

PanARMENIAN.Net - Author Peter Balakian was among this year’s recipients at a special celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prizes.

The Poetry Society of America hosted a night of readings by 13 recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Among the poets were Balakian, John Ashbery, Yusef Koumanyaka, Sharon Olds, Stephen Dunn and Jorie Graham. The event took place in the Great Hall at Cooper Union, The Armenian Mirror Spectator reports.

Balakian was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems “Ozone Journal”. The Pulitzer committee noted Ozone Journal for “poems that bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty.”

Keith Jones writing in Consequence Magazine wrote about Ozone Journal: “Balakian is a master of—the drifting, split-second mirage, the cinematic dissolve and cross-cut as well as the sculptural, statuesque moment chiseled out of consonant blends and an imagistic, jazzman’s ear for vowels. . . beautiful, haunting, plaintive, urgent, in our dying world’s age, these poems legislate a vital comportment to the demands of our shared present, timely and untimely both.”