Hala Alyan's Twenty-Ninth Year Reviewed

At The Rumpus, Anne Grau considers Alyan's latest collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, "a story of a haunting year in settings both geographical and psychological." Picking up there: 

In one of the early poems in the book, “Armadillo,” the speaker travels through time and location to where her family has lived, visited, and built memories. Scenes are sewn together with images that may not have sparked interest initially, but through a poetic lens of years and introspection Alyan assigns deep-rooted feelings that emerge from remembered details. The speaker tells us, “I know there was a boat,” and we are provided this metaphor that returns later in the poem, anchoring meaning and allowing us to step back to observe the pieced-together quilt in its entirety. We see the boat that tows both the speaker’s heartache and the “two hearts of the same machine”—the parents who represent the whole world in stories told over generations, or who are witnessed by children still in the process of defining love.

Definitions of love and heartache are hard to pin down in Alyan’s poems, given the inconsistencies of the human heart and the difficulty in dealing with memories of hurt and regret that are as ephemeral as “an armadillo that may or may not have existed.” In other poems, heartache unfolds in blasts of recall—close and physically observant recollections of lovers, parents, a husband, friends, and strangers.

The process of detoxifying the body of alcohol, as well as the pain that remains once the numbness is gone, is the subject of a number of poems in the collection, and feels like a character in the speaker’s story. In “Step One: Admit Powerlessness,” the speaker’s words read like an anti-confession: “I won’t call it rape, / because a tree can’t be killed twice.” She finds “God, / lurking in the X-ray of my abdomen, a single apostrophe / between the bowed ribcages.” She is powerless to define herself or what she’s gone through until an epiphany “explodes like a white tusk in the evening,” elucidating a new conviction where she “believes in a different god.” The four steps of The Twelve-Step Program chosen as titles provide one of the thematic threads in the collection for readers to grasp in the sea of lyrical waves where guilt, shame, and trauma linger.

Read on at The Rumpus.