**The Twenty-Ninth Year**  
Hala Alyan

Wild, lyrical poems that examine the connections between physical and interior migration, from award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan, author of _Salt Houses_.

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.

**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.**

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