The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems

By Hala Alyan

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781328512727

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Hala Alyan

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Alyan, Hala, 1986– author.

Title: The twenty-ninth year / Hala Alyan.

Other titles: 29th year

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018024865 (print) | LCCN 2018026008 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328512727 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328511942 (trade paper) Classification: LCC PS3601.L92 (ebook) | LCC PS3601.L92 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024865

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover photograph © Caroyl LaBarge

Author photograph © Beowulf Sheehan

v2.0519

FOR TALAL

who always knows before I do

Truth

I’m allergic to hair dye and silver. Of the worlds,

I love the Aztecs’ most of all, the way they lit fires

in the gouged chests of men to keep the world spinning.

I’ve seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn’t eat bread.

I will never be as beautiful as the night I danced in a garage,

anorexic, decked in black boots, black sweater, black jeans,

hip-hop music and a girl I didn’t know pulling my hips

to hers. Hunger is hunger. I got drunk one night

and argued with the Pacific. I was twenty. I broke

into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar. I wasn’t twenty.

In the winter of those years I kept Christmas lights

strung around my bed and argued with the Italian landlady

who lived downstairs about turning the heat off,

and every night I wanted to drink but didn’t.

What I changed, I could;

what I couldn’t, I endured.

DOROTHY VAUGHAN

Transcend

You tell me we must forgive the heat. Everyone is talking about the latest shooting.

The city shimmies its indigo rooftops. A soldier couldn’t forgive his daddy. A sheriff wanted to chalk the pavement.

In Aleppo a child white as a birthday cake, limp in her father’s fists. 600,000 dead. You must’ve added a zero by accident.

      I tug your pants to your ankles and make you speak God.

There are a hundred videos of the same moment shot from a hundred different angles. I watch every single one.

      I let her pull the white out of you.

The father looking the camera directly in the eye. Look, her name was. Who will catch him when his knees buckle. Look, the mortar grows on our houses like moss.

The exile knows his bones are 206 instruments. There is a song in each one.

I filmed the sky to show you the pale face that lives within it. See that eye? Ask it to love you.

The Female of the Species

They leave the country with gasping babies and suitcases

full of spices and cassettes. In airports,

they line themselves up like wine bottles.

The new city twinkles beneath an onion moon.

Birds mistake the pebbles of glass on the

black asphalt for bread crumbs.

If I drink, I tell stories about the women I know.

They break dinner plates. They marry impulsively.

When I was a child I watched my aunt throw a halo

of spaghetti at my mother. Now I’m older than they were.

In an old-new year, my cousin shouts ana bint Beirut

at the sleeping houses. She clatters up the stairs.

I never remember to tell her anything. Not the dream

where I can’t yell loud enough for her to stop running.

And the train comes. And the amar layers the stones

like lichen. How the best night of my life was the one

she danced with me in Paris, sharing a hostel bed,

and how sometimes you need one knife to carve another.

Reviews for The Twenty-Ninth Year

[obi_wan_rocks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hala Alyan is truly gifted with the ability to transport the reader into her heart, her mind, and around the entire world, all in one masterful verse.