The Twenty-Ninth Year - Hala Alyan

Written by Hala Alyan
Read by Hala Alyan
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

“This is the stuff of life, the very essence of the poetic.” (LitHub)

For Hala Alyan, 29 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.

Length: 1 hr and 14 mins
Release date: 01-21-20