The Twenty-ninth Year

For Hala Alyan, twenty-nine is a year of transformation and upheaval, a year in which the past{u2014}memories of family ... (more)

For Hala Alyan, twenty-nine is a year of transformation and upheaval, a year in which the past{u2014}memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith{u2014}winds itself around the present. Hala{u2019}s ever-shifting, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body. Poems leap from war-torn cities in the Middle East, to an Oklahoma Olive Garden, a Brooklyn brownstone; from alcoholism to recovery; from a single woman to a wife. This collection summons breathtaking chaos, one that seeps into the bones of these odes, the shape of these elegies. (less)