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The Twenty-Ninth Year

Audiobook
Nonfiction: Poetry
Unabridged   1.5 hour(s)
Publication date: 01/21/2020

LitHub Most Anticipated Books of 2019

The Twenty-Ninth Year

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Digital Download ISBN:9781684578832

Summary

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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Product Description

"This is the stuff of life, the very essence of the poetic." —LitHub

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.

Reviews/Praise

"This is the stuff of life, the very essence of the poetic." –LitHub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2019"

“[A] truly stellar collection of poetry…. If the collection wants for anything, it’s that each poem offers only a glimpse or a moment, whereas the subject matter could sustain several more pages of vicious, gripping verse. Luckily, readers can dive into the rest of Alyan’s burgeoning oeuvre: another three books of poetry and a critically acclaimed novel, Salt Houses (2017).”—Booklist Starred Review

"Alyan’s fourth book of poems arrives with the earnest ambition of a debut, but the care of a poet whose lines have earned their sentiment. Poems of sorrow and shame live next to verses of desire. The Twenty-Ninth Year bursts with lamentations, hopes, fears, and a weary but wide faith." —The Millions, "Must Read Poetry"

Author Bio

Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Colorado Review. She lives in New York.