💡 Clinical psychologist by day and gut-spilling poet by night, Hala Alyan offers a deeply intimate and confessional collection of poems in her 2019 book The Twenty-Ninth Year. The award-winning Palestinian-American poet centers the collection around the milestone of turning 29, trailing back to vivid memories shaped by family, exile, ex-lovers, struggles with alcoholism, and a hard-to-define life lived across different cities and countries.

Alyan’s poems capture a whirlwind of transient moments. Oklahoma, Texas, Beirut, Damascus, and Brooklyn make up some of the places where her memories take root. Through fragmented sentences and strikingly singular metaphors, Alyan experiments with form as much as she experiments with meaning. Some poems rush by, their flow almost outpacing their meaning, while others feel deliberately arbitrary, gaining clarity — or plunging deeper into chaos — upon each re-read.

Her poetry reveals her parents’ loving relationship, framed in contrast to their life as immigrants, constantly packing up and moving elsewhere. She revisits her time in the US, often highlighting the degrading white-male gaze upon her as an Arab girl. She also confesses a complex, erotic love life, reflecting on her past lovers through her ever-changing torments with identity. Married life, her kleptomaniac tendencies, and the constant surveillance that comes with being in exile are more of the difficulties that she portrays very poignantly.

The Twenty-Ninth Year offers a spell-binding look into the vast inner life of Hala Alyan. Her experiences are conveyed in compact, visceral bursts, and the disjointedness between her verses creates a thematically colorful and brimming portrait of memories that are as unforgettable as they are uniquely delivered. The less you grasp in her words, the more you feel — and the more you’re compelled to read on.

WHERE TO GET IT- You can find the poetry collection in paperback at Diwan. You can also find the eBook on Kobo.

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