The Twenty-Ninth Year

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. |

"In poem after poem, there is raw emotion, straightforward storytelling, and unapologetic truth. The poems here read like scars...sometimes they are up-front and easily understood. Sometimes they show up sporting shattered lines or jump from one memory to the next, making you think of a bird that abruptly changes direction mid-flight after hearing a gunshot. That intimate feeling is hard to find, and Alyan offers it here in spades." - NPR

"Best exemplifies poetry’s hybridity...blends forms, tangles modes, travels through time and space and leaps from the intensely personal to the acerbically political...with scathing wit, fierce self-examination, and challenging syntax. Alyan takes great risks, drips her full, naked self onto the page, and inspires her readers to embrace and examine our gravest mistakes, for every part of ourselves is a piece of a complicated puzzle that we can’t — mustn’t — stop trying to solve." - Vulture

"There exists, within her poems, the cacophony that pervades our most intimate of relationships, a glistering sheen covering even the most banal interactions. Her poems feel as familiar as the prayers we make up in our own minds, as we feverishly ask for that which we’re only just realizing that we want; they’re a quiet triumph, sacred and profane, and, most of all, grounded in humanity." - Nylon Magazine

"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