The Twenty-Ninth Year

Starred review from January 1, 2019
Inspired by how, every 29 years, Saturn returns to the same spot in the night sky it occupied at the time of one's birth, Alyan packs this truly stellar collection of poetry with a preponderance of heavy topics: anorexia, alcoholism, sobriety, sex, Islam, wedlock, recovery, and more. Composed primarily of blocks of prose and long, precise couplets, the poems depict a speaker who recites suras from the Qur'an but who doesn't fast or kneel, who drinks and snorts and smokes but who also abstains to the point of starvation. These candid idiosyncrasies also risk isolation and loneliness: I'm divisible only by myself. Quintessentially American in its traversing of the heartland, from Texas and Oklahoma to California and New York, Alyan's poems also layer in Beirut, Aleppo, and the Greek islands. If the collection wants for anything, it's that each poem offers only a glimpse or a moment, whereas the subject matter could sustain several more pages of vicious, gripping verse. Luckily, readers can dive into the rest of Alyan's burgeoning oeuvre: another three books of poetry and a critically acclaimed novel, Salt Houses (2017).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from January 1, 2019

Palestinian American poet Alyan's first poetry collection (following her multi-award-winning debut novel, Salt House) investigates the titular milestone year in everyone's life, one that was particularly significant to her as she recalls friends and family, forced displacement, and adapting to a new land and language. The poems range widely in style from the almost conversational to more impervious, stylized cryptograms. Alyan moves with grace and courage in her poems, especially in her bare descriptions of a battle with anorexia, the relationship between father and daughter, and the stark realizations she depicts of a young girl tugged between her family's past and a life of American fast food restaurants where she's told how she doesn't fit in. "I am nothing but/ a body" she writes in "Gospel: Beruit" before the poem breaks off with absence, an "only if" without an ending. That lack of resolution defines this entire collection. VERDICT This is coming-of-age poetry from a voice that resists categorization. It will appeal to a wide range of readers.--Emily Bowles, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison