"Armenians sometimes wonder if their voice is audible in the world, especially during times of crisis. In the realm of literature, and poetry in particular, there is no doubt that it is, with Pulitzer Prize winning poets like Peter Balakian. Balakian’s work places the Armenian experience on a level of universal significance, not leaving it isolated in the realm of ethnic or folk life, nor buried dead in history. At the age of seventy, he continues to produce prolifically. His newest volume of poetry, No Sign, just published, is another masterful collection weaving together all sorts of elements of contemporary life, with an Armenian perspective and memory prominent."

The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

"As a coherent volume, the poems index Balakian’s archetypal themes of dislocation, suffering, and loss. As a varied collection, they reflect a decade of global discord and upheaval. Together, the poems speak to each other in strange and unexpected ways."

Harvard Review

"This is a collection concerned with the ghosts of history: personal, family, political, and literary. Balakian is on the lookout for ‘the ghost map’— past lives overlaid on his own, like transparencies that give illumination. This intuitive, almost situationist approach, is far more interesting than standard historiography; for Balakian (note the near ‘Blake’ in there), it is the intoxication of the poem’s journey that counts. . . . Balakian does what he’s done all through this incredible book and ever alert to poetry’s ability to make time collapse, he writes the luminous present: ‘Here the light is coming/over the border from Armenia.’"

Chris McCabe | Wasafiri

"Pulitzer-winning poet Balakian returns with a kinetic eighth book that transports the reader across borders and through memory. . . . Balakian pays witness to the cyclicality of personal and political violence, the 'crosswinds' of the past and present. . . . 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."

Publishers Weekly

"Balakian is a good wine that needs no bush. Sensitively attuned to histories of disaffection, disruption, and derangement, he is a master of collage, resulting in poetry of expansive, long sequences. A poetry of montage, fluctuating rhythm, and inner tension where motion is skilfully embedded with emotion that never becomes transgressively extreme. Balakian’s refined intelligence keeps control throughout as he reveals his larger historical sense. . . . 'No Sign' should be taken as the final part of a trilogy, begun with 'A- Train / Ziggurat / Elegy' and continued with 'Ozone Journal' from Ziggurat and Ozone Journal, respectively. A trilogy of exceptional technical expertise, sincerity, moral clarity, and power."

Keith Garebian | World LIterature Today

"No Sign masterfully juxtaposes the magnificence of human achievement, as exemplified in music and architecture, with the inescapable fact of human malfeasance that results in war, persecution and estrangement."

Consequence Forum

"A poetry of montage, fluctuating rhythm, and inner tension where motion is skillfully embedded with emotion that never becomes transgressively extreme. Balakian’s refined intelligence keeps control throughout as he reveals his larger historical sense."

World Literature Today

“Balakian understands the bewildered music of our times, and No Sign, more than any other contemporary book of poetry, teaches us about the properties of time; we are inside the speech that is addressing time and opposing it, witnessing it, and walking two steps ahead. This 'time-sense' is explored with depth in the brilliant title poem. Balakian is able to praise the world though he knows its ‘bitter history.’ And praise he does! The lyricism here is of utter beauty. No Sign is a splendid, necessary book."

Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

“Balakian has been writing intellectually challenging poems of ‘bright unbearable reality’ that are part of an ongoing conversation in American poetry for some time. They have the horizontal continuum of history, like Walcott and Heaney, but they also have verticality which arrests time and connects with the demonic and divine. He masterfully does the thing nobody else does which is to derange history into poetry, to make poetry painting, to make painting culture, to make culture living, and with a historical depth that finds the right experience in language.”

Bruce Smith, author of Spill

“In No Sign, Balakian embraces the claims of immediacy as well as the encompassing historical perspective. His images and sharp syncopations locate the pulse of our times and give it a prophetic reverberation. Here is a voice of witness which also makes room for an irrepressible sensory imagination.”

Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age