Ozone Journal

Ozone Journal centers on an extended title sequence of fifty four individual sections, each one working as a poem in itself while also building toward a larger whole. The sequence recounts the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian Genocide victims in the Syrian desert in 2009, traveling there with a crew of television journalists, and interweaves that excavation with memories of New York City during the crisis ridden 1980s, letting two very different landscapes, one of buried atrocity and one of a city in the grip of its own crisis, speak to each other across the same poem.

Balakian has described poetry's particular capacity to absorb history and turn historical memory into a dynamic, present force, and Ozone Journal enacts that claim directly, treating the act of digging for physical remains as continuous with the act of remembering a personal decade. Critic Bruce Smith praised Balakian's ability to derange history into poetry and to make poetry painting, a description that points at how freely the book moves between registers, historical, visual, and personal, without losing track of any of them.

Reading Ozone Journal means following a long, associative sequence that trusts a reader to hold multiple timelines and locations at once, the Syrian desert and 1980s Manhattan overlapping rather than arriving in tidy chronological order. It suits a reader interested in how personal memory and historical atrocity can occupy a single sustained poem without one simply illustrating the other. Balakian's long lines give the book a steady, accumulating momentum, so that the fifty four sections build cumulative weight rather than standing as separate, interchangeable fragments.