A Review of Ozone Journal By Peter Balakian

Title: Ozone Journal
Author: Peter Balakian
Genres: Poetry, #Ownvoices

Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780226207032

Summary: The title poem of Peter Balakian’s Ozone Journal is a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself, recounting the speaker’s memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists in 2009. These memories spark others—the dissolution of his marriage, his life as a young single parent in Manhattan in the nineties, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS—creating a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience. Bookending this sequence are shorter lyrics that span times and locations, from Nairobi to the Native American villages of New Mexico. In the dynamic, sensual language of these poems, we are reminded that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is both global and ancient; but we are reminded, too, of the beauty and richness of culture and the resilience of love.

Ozone Journal is unlike the majority of poetry I have read in my entire life. Balakian’s style is lyrical and linguistic, drawing attention to social issues that remain prevalent in our lives: AIDS, genocide, cultural breakdown, and memories, woven intrinsically.
History is told through his words and you get a sense that you are one of many, gathered around an orator by the fire, hearing of worlds you never knew about before. Balakian certainly used words I didn’t understand but it made me want to know more about where he’d been: New Mexico, New York, Detroit, Allepo.

These seemingly far geographical locations shared a history and Balakian expressed the shared grief, pride, and resilience of these civilizations, regardless of distance.
Poetry can be difficult to understand because it’s often subjective and you must remove yourself, willing to see through another’s eyes, to feel the undercurrent; to hear what isn’t being said aloud. I struggled with Ozone Journal because of my ignorance. I know very little of the places he spoke of and of their struggles but as I read, I found myself feeling quite lucky and grateful for the life I have.
Ozone Journal is painful. It’s beautiful, it’s blunt, and it is human – almost unbearably. That being said, I’d read it again and again because it exposes what I don’t see and what I haven’t felt and what I don’t know.

I rated this ♥♥♥ out of five because it was, truly, an arduous read. Though I thoroughly enjoyed it, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t love poetry. Or honesty, for that matter.