Twenty-Ninth Year The

<p><strong>"This is the stuff of life the very essence of the poetic." -LitHub</strong><br /><br />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.<br /><br />A vivid catalog of heartache loneliness love and joy <em>The Twenty-Ninth Year</em> is an education in looking for home and self in the space between disparate identities.</p>