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3.0 

The Twenty-Ninth Year

By Hala Alyan
The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Wild, lyrical poems that examine the connections between physical and interior migration, from award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan, author of Salt Houses.

For Hala Alyan, twenty-nine is a year of transformation and upheaval, a year in which the past—memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith—winds itself around the present.

Hala’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.

A vivid catalog of heartache, loneliness, love and joy, The Twenty-Ninth Year is an education in looking for home and self in the space between disparate identities.

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26 Reviews

3.0
“I so enjoyed The Moon That Turns You Back that I was eager to read more of Alyan's poetry. Unfortunately this collection doesn't remotely compare. There was an occasional breath taking line, but by and large I couldn't connect with this collection. I often am able to recognize that something is not for me and that's why I am not enjoying it, which is absolutely expected to happen, but this didn't even feel like that. It felt like poetry-soup? There are much heavier themes of this collection, so content warnings for sexual assault and disordered eating.”

About Hala Alyan

Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by TheNew Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, TheNew York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

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