Hala Alyan Bücher

or Jahren schon musste Salma ihre geliebte Heimat Jaffa verlassen. In Nablus hat sie mit ihrem Mann und ihren Kindern einen neuen Platz gefunden. Doch das Haus bleibt ihr stets fremd. Allein den Garten kann sie zu ihrem eigenen Reich machen, und unter ihren Händen wird er zu einem farbenfrohen Paradies. Ihre Tochter Alia dagegen fühlt sich mit dem Haus und Nablus so verbunden, wie Salma es mit Jaffa war. Doch der Kaffeesatz sagt auch Alia ein unruhiges und schwieriges Leben voraus. Salma verschweigt diesen Teil der Vorahnung und muss erleben, wie ihr Sohn ihr im Sechstagekrieg genommen wird und ihre Tochter nach Kuwait flieht. Alia hasst ihr neues, beengtes Leben und durchlebt, so wie ihre Mutter, nicht nur dieselbe Sehnsucht nach der Heimat, sondern auch den Widerstand ihrer Kinder gegen ihr Festhalten an den alten Regeln. Zwanzig Jahre später verlieren Alia und ihre Familie erneut ihr Zuhause und retten sich in alle Himmelsrichtungen: nach Boston, Paris, Beirut. Wieder einmal wird ihre Geschichte von anderen bestimmt und geschrieben. Erst als Alias Kinder in der Fremde auf einen Ort hoffen, der ihnen für immer bleibt, begreifen sie, dass die Überzeugungen ihrer Mutter deren einziger Halt in einer sich ständig ändernden Welt sind.

From the award-winning author of Salt Houses, a rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home

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

In her third poetry collection, Hijra, Hala Alyan creates poems of migration and flight reflecting and bearing witness to the haunting particulars in her transnational journey as well as those of her mother, her mother's sister, the lost aunts of her father in Gaza, and her Syrian grandmother.

This landmark anthology gathers together almost two-hundred vibrant English-language love poems by living writers of Arab descent. We Call to the Eye and to the Night is an amalgam of eminent poets —Hayan Charara, Leila Chatti, Nathalie Handal, Fady Joudah, and Naomi Shihab Nye, among them—and those who have just begun to make their mark. These poets are descended from diverse countries and represent a breathtaking intersection of voices, experiences, and perspectives. Divided into whimsical sections (named for lines from poems they include), the anthology features an evocative array of erotic and romantic selections, as well as ones portraying love of family, friends, heritage, and homeland. Exquisitely curated and introduced by acclaimed authors Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck, We Call to the Eye and to the Night is at once sexy, sensuous, adventurous, and nostalgic—a treasury of love emanating from the Arab world and its diaspora.

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?