"Vise and Shadow belongs on a shelf alongside the literary essays of J. M. Coetzee, Adrienne Rich, and Seamus Heaney--all of whom are absorbed by the very same questions haunting and inspiring Balakian."
— Askold Melnyczuk, author of The House of Widows
"With soaring critical erudition, Peter Balakian’s essays range across multiple genres--poetry, memoir, film, visual art, history, 'literary rock'--to create a brilliant collage of both American imagination and Armenian memory. An elegantly written, seminal work of sweeping importance."
— James Carroll, author of An American Requiem
"Here are the burdens of literature. Here is the perpetual wandering of ideas that have found a good home. Every chapter is an awakening. Every reflection, something not heard before."
— Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
“While Balakian’s essays [Vise and Shadow] reveal the ways history and its discontents inscribe themselves in the smallest features of familiar texts, his poems [Ozone Journal] offer a mournful silence in the face of these social upheavals, and their aftermath, that is only possible within the realm of art. Readers will find both texts equally necessary and equally moving.”
— Kristina Marie Darling, Colorado Review
“Peter Balakian is the preeminent Armenian writer in English today, whether the genre is poetry (Ziggurat, Ozone Journal), memoir (Black Dog of Fate), history (The Burning Tigris), or, as in the present case, cultural criticism. . . . [Vise and Shadow] offer[s] new insights into the relationships between trauma, memory, and aesthetic form . . . by exploring two dimensions of the lyric imagination in poetry, art, and culture.”
— Keith Garebian, World Literature Today
"Vise and Shadow stands as an important contribution to the ongoing dialog about culture, modernity, and memory."
— Talisman
“Few American poets of the boomer generation have explored the interstices of public and personal history as deeply and urgently as has Balakian, and his significance as a poet of social consciousness is complemented by his work in other genres.”
— David Wojahn, Tikkun