The Moon That Turns You Back
Poems
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Arsonists’ City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war.
A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.
These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body—and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity, and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, What stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The formally inventive and devastatingly evocative latest from Alyan (The Twenty-Ninth Year) reckons with grief, displacement, and enduring kinship. From Beirut to the U.S. to Jerusalem to Kuwait, Alyan draws from her experience as a Palestinian American to examine where one's home is under occupation and forced displacement. An interaction with an Israeli soldier in Jerusalem, in which her passport is withheld until she agrees to take her hair down, is referenced repeatedly, evoking the helplessness of the occupied. Alyan's ghazals are the jewels of the collection. In "Fatima :: Dust Ghazal," the speaker has married "Salim with the long neck," and in the process "became wife to three countries." There's plenty of joy—and defiance—in these pages. In "Tonight I'll Dream of Nadia," the speaker experiences the pleasure of being with her family when a loved one is in the hospital on a ventilator. At the poem's end, she is in a nightclub: "I am/ everyone's daughter, everyone's wife, I muscle/ through the crowd to dance, I feel her hand in/ my hair as the machine breathes for us both." These powerful poems linger long in the mind.
