The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala Alyan
The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala Alyan
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The Moon That Turns You Back
Poems

Author: Hala Alyan

Narrator: Hala Alyan

Unabridged: 1 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ecco

Published: 03/12/2024

Synopsis

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?

About Hala Alyan

Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

Reviews

Goodreads review by s.penkevich

‘Forgetting something doesn’t change it,’ writes Hala Alyan in The Moon That Turns You Back. Averting our eyes won’t stop the bombs that fall, pushing out memories won’t erase a loss, a distance from violence won’t stop the bombs that fall, denial ‘can’t put a corpse back together.’ The poems collec......more

Goodreads review by liv ❁

Hala Alyan does an excellent job using creative techniques to write about displacement and diaspora specifically relating to Palestine as well as some more personal struggles she has had with womanhood, most specifically her journey with motherhood. I foundt that her poems about diaspora and the wom......more

Goodreads review by Lydia

Hala Alyan what a great collection of poems. I usually don't care for poetry, but this collection of poems really touched my heart and soul. I read a few poems each day. They really stuck with me. I will be buying this wonderful book to give as gifts to my friends and family. Highly recommend.......more

Goodreads review by Traci

Some really interesting stuff here with past and future generations, home and belonging. She also does cool formal stuff with the way poems are constructed. The ghazals were my faves. A few poems really hit and a few didn’t and the rest were solid.......more

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