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.

Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date Published: January 29, 2019
Subjects: Poetry Middle Eastern Psychology Ethnopsychology Mental Health

About the Author: Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Guernica and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Series. Her debut novel, Salt Houses, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017, and won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Town & Country called it “spring’s most powerful novel.” Her newest poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, was recently published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.