The Twenty-Ninth Year

By: Hala Alyan

Narrated by: Hala Alyan

"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.

©2019 Hala Alyan (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

So vivid and evoking.

Absolutely loved everything about this. The self-reflection was poignant, evoking and so relatable, even with such a chasm between our life experiences. Just beautiful.

The depth

Peering into the souls of the various writers, I find connection in depth of different human emotions across a span of time I don’t occupy. This was inspiring. Beautiful.