Hala Alyan writes poems as if she were on fire, and The Twenty-Ninth Year is exemplary. The title of the collection refers to the poet's age. Nearing 30, she offers one incendiary take after another on a broken world, through which she navigates with a keen, if weary, eye. The Palestinian American poet jumps from life in the Middle East--Syria, Iraq, Beirut--to the United States, exploring immigration, displacement, substance abuse and alienation, always with a will to face reality no matter the cost.
The poet's style varies. She often writes in blocks of prose poetry. She also uses fragments and run-ons to razor-sharp effect. Her poems have the texture of shrapnel. Nowhere is this truer than in "Cliffhanger," in which the poet's thoughts spill across the page as though driven by combustible force: "how I still defend him how a wound/ like that/ over a decade/ becomes a kind of heart." In "Aleppo," the grim realities of civil war are juxtaposed with the poet's "ugly human impulse to make it mine." Bringing that trauma back to the states, she writes, "We could paper all of Arkansas with your missing." But the collection is not without a scrappy hope, that human impulse that also moves toward wholeness. "I want to love something without having to apologize for it," she says in "I'm Not Speaking First." "Please don't tell."
Full of painful truths, The Twenty-Ninth Year is riveting verse. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset