“Redemption, Refuge & Release”: Peter Balakian, Victoria Chang, John Freeman & Victoria Redel

John Freeman is the founder of Freeman’s, a literary biannual, and an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He is the author of How To Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as a trilogy of anthologies – Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World, Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, and Tales of Two Cities: Stories of Inequality in a Divided New York. He is also the author of two previous poetry collections, Maps and The Park, and a co-editor with Tracy K. Smith of the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zyzzyva; each month he hosts California Book Club, an online discussion of a book from the Golden State, with Alta magazine. In Wind, Trees (Copper Canyon Press), Freeman presents a meditation on power and loss, change and adaptation. What can the trees teach us about inhabiting space together? What might we gain if we admit we do not control the wind and cannot possibly carry all we’ve been handed? Offering a stark moral critique of pandemic self-preservation, Wind, Trees is both politically urgent yet timeless. In Animals – featuring new work from Mieko Kawakami, Martín Espada, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Arthur Sze, Camonghne Felix, and more – Freeman’s explores the irrevocably intertwined lives of animals and the humans that exist alongside them.

Peter Balakian is the author of eight books of poems, including Ozone Journal, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and Ziggurat. His memoir Black Dog of Fate won the PEN/Albrand Award, and The Burning Tigris was a New York Times bestseller and notable book. In his latest collection, No Sign (University of Chicago Press), Balakian wrestles with national and global cultural and political realities as he addresses challenges for the human species and the impact of mass violence. At the collection’s heart is the title piece, another in Balakian’s series of long-form poems, following “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy” and “Ozone Journal,” which appeared in his previous two collections. The dialogue that ensues reveals the evolution of a memory spanning decades, reflecting on the geological history of Earth, the climate crisis, the film Hiroshima mon amour, the Vietnam War, and the enduring power of love. Whether meditating on the sensuality of fruits and vegetables, the COVID-19 pandemic, the trauma and memory of the Armenian genocide, James Baldwin in France, or Arshile Gorky in New York City, Balakian’s layered, elliptical language, wired phrases, and shifting tempos engage both life’s harshness and beauty, and define his inventive and distinctive style.

Victoria Chang is the author of six books of poetry, including Obit, listed in The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2020, and as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020. Born in Detroit to Taiwanese immigrants, she was educated at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford Business School, and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson. In The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press), Chang reinvigorates language through concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Composed mainly in various Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” each poem is shaped by pattern and count. It’s a highly original work that innovates inside the lineage of great poets, including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name – with reverence, economy, and whimsy – the ache of wanting.

Victoria Redel – whose work has been anthologized, awarded, and translated into 10 languages – is a first-generation American author of four books of poetry and five books of fiction, most recently Paradise (Four Way Books) and the novel Before Everything. Her debut novel, Loverboy (2001), was adapted into a feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. She is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College. In Paradise, Redel rewrites Eden, interrogating the idea of utopia within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. “But doesn’t every story begin with expulsion?” she asks. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, she weaves in religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. And in examining those borders, she navigates geopolitical perimeters and the space between the living and the dead, and delineates the migrations aging women make in their bodies and lives. Paradise considers how a legacy of trauma shapes imagination and illuminates the threads that tie recent catastrophes to the demands and flight paths that made us.