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The Moon That Turns You Back: Poems
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?
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?
112 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 2024
About the author
Hala Alyan
19 books933 followersHala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals including The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner and Colorado Review. She resides in Brooklyn with her husband.
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July 5, 2024
‘Forgetting something doesn’t change it,’ writes Hala Alyan in The Moon That Turns You Back. Averting our eyes won’t stop the bombs that fall, pushing out memories won’t erase a loss, a distance from violence won’t stop the bombs that fall, denial ‘can’t put a corpse back together.’ The poems collected in The Moon That Turns You Back, the impressive fifth volume of poetry by the Palestinian-American poet and author move through a series of deep meditations on grief and loss while interrogating the ways we attempt to edit or emphasize our lives through narrative. Alyan prose cascades across your heart like teardrops down a cheek, often employing experimental forms that not only keep the work feeling fresh and unique but allow her to confront painful moments in abstract ways that can better burrow into the heart of complex sorrows. With incredible grace and empathy, Alyan’s work is heavy but heartfelt, addressing issues such as the loss of an unborn child or the cognitive dissonance of grieving for people under bombardment half a world away while also going about day-to-day life, making this a moving and very necessary work of painful beauty.
strike [air]
and there are griefs that hold like teapots
and there are bodies that open like ports
and there are rains that mushroom and there are months that reverse like cars
and there are loves that burn like
Sunday
and there are loves that burn like
Sunday
and there is a grave an hour from the sea
and the only thing left to do is fill it
Outside the writing world, Hala Alyan works as a clinical psychologist specializing in processing trauma and cross-culture identities which nestles itself rather productively into her poetry. Front and center in this collection is the violence in Gaza and Alyan, born of a Palestinian family with her father ‘one passport short of country / one country short of citizen,’ spends much of the first half of this collection dealing with the violence that comes at a distance yet also a constant drip via social media. There is the dissonance of the horrific mass murders of Palestinian civilians and children while going about daily life in a society not only at a remove but largely averting its eyes from the violence. To be living where frequently someone ‘dies and the sun is out all week,’ the sort of shame akin to that which builds across Ilya Kaminsky’s viral poem We Lived Happily During the War . It is a cumbersome grief we see, to be alive and well while others are in constant peril, such as in the poem Naturalize:
There are even the struggles to process her own personal griefs in juxtaposition with the great mass of grief and violence on the news. She is often looking for this space, unsure where to turn, reminding us that this is a struggle we all often face and, in that shared grief, we carry one another's burdens together instead of holding up our own as if in competition for greater suffering.
Included in this collection are two poems Alyan had previously in The New Yorker magazine addressing the violence in May of 2021 which killed just over 260 Palestinians— 67 of them were children who are remembered HERE— that convery the message of the title Half-Life in Exile (you can read the full poem HERE). It is a poem in which she examines the heavy burden of witness and grief—‘ I wrote the poem / after weeks of despair, hauling myself / like a rock’—yet the struggle to feel it has accomplished anything.
She writes about this at length in an article for Teen Vogue, What a Palestinian-American Wants You To Know About Dehumanization on how ‘art is not a replacement for policy. Poems will not save us. Poems will not save Gaza. I say that as a poet.’ Which is a similar struggle expressed in the poems of Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd who writes in his collection, Rifqa, ‘At a certain point, the metaphor tires. At a certain point, I’ll grab a brick.’ Though Alyan also balances this with the necessity of witness:
This is a key element of The Moon That Turns You Back, looking at the narratives as a way to process and to remember. For further reading, she also wrote an incredible article on processing grief while removed from Gaza in The Guardian last year.
‘Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don't interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage.
For what it's done to get here.’
The concept of remembering figures prominently across many of the collection’s topics and is often expressed in rather unique stylistic choices and framing. The poem Sleep Study No. 3 approaches clinical studies of sleep abnormalities to which she writes ‘It’s not night that’s the problem, it’s war’ and proceeds into the use of blacking out key words under the heading ‘this dark is a study on redaction.’ The blacking out, which feels like redacted military or government documents, shows a sense of repression. Alternatively, there is a segment of poems near the end addressing the struggles of being unable to bring a child to term that appear as emotionless hospital communications yet have key words written in bold that, when read on their own, form brief abstract poems. It feels like the opposite of blackout poems, instead of removing the words around it, she emphasizes them in order to protect the human and emotional weight otherwise drowned out in the cold and clinical. In her poem [Political] dialogue, she addresses a situation where she keeps it a secret that she never had the baby during a phone conversation with a distant relative–a reminder that we edit or remove sometimes as a sort of protections. And not only for ourselves, such as the mother carrying her children over a field of corpses shields their eyes thinking ‘I remember so you can forget’
‘I want to fight for a country even if
that country didn't want me even if
when my mother bought a patch of land & tried
to put my name on it they wouldn't let me
because my name is mv father's name
because he was born in Palestine and so
impossible and so I am fated to love what won't
have me you know the way our mothers did’
—from Brute?
Other fascinating experimental styles present here is a poem that offers a word bank to insert into the various blank spaces (which reminded me of standardized tests in high school) or Alyan’s poems titled Interactive Fiction which offer a sort of choose-your-own adventure style poem beginning with an opening line and offering three different perspectives to continue along. In one such poem—Windows—we can choose to examine the poem in the context of Fatima, Alyan’s grandmother who appears frequently in the collection, a ‘wife to three countries’ and through which Alyan explores themes of family and displacement. In the poem, the speaker dials a number and the reader can choose to have them call Fatima, Nadia, or nobody. If they choose Fatima, the poem continues ‘I call [Fatima] but it’s my own pocket that buzzes.’ This poem follows a series of Fatima poems in which Alyan writes ‘its beautiful to speak for her; she’s dead,’ and the phone ringing in her pocket is a creative way to address that she has internalized her grandmother and the family legacy.
‘I’d rather be alive than holy.
I don’t have time to write about the soul.
There are bodies to count. There’s a man
Wearing his wedding tuxedo in case
I meet God and there’s a brick of light
Before each bombing.’
—from The Interviewer Wants to Know About Fashion
This is quite the emotionally intense collection with deep dives into many painful but necessary confrontations with grief and sorrow and while we may feel bogged down by the weight of the world, these poems still soar. Not all is dark here too, with some lovely lines about love saying ‘I circle you like a devoted planet,’ quips like ‘I want my stars sexy,’ or the rather gorgeous In the love poem on an imagined life where all the small inconveniences up to great griefs never happen and we can cozily reside in love. With heartfelt power, empathy and grace, The Moon That Turns You Back is an excellent volume of poetry from a marvelous poet.
4.5/5
‘You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I'm here to tell you the tide will never
stop coming in.
I'm here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.’
strike [air]
and there are griefs that hold like teapots
and there are bodies that open like ports
and there are rains that mushroom and there are months that reverse like cars
and there are loves that burn like
Sunday
and there are loves that burn like
Sunday
and there is a grave an hour from the sea
and the only thing left to do is fill it
Outside the writing world, Hala Alyan works as a clinical psychologist specializing in processing trauma and cross-culture identities which nestles itself rather productively into her poetry. Front and center in this collection is the violence in Gaza and Alyan, born of a Palestinian family with her father ‘one passport short of country / one country short of citizen,’ spends much of the first half of this collection dealing with the violence that comes at a distance yet also a constant drip via social media. There is the dissonance of the horrific mass murders of Palestinian civilians and children while going about daily life in a society not only at a remove but largely averting its eyes from the violence. To be living where frequently someone ‘dies and the sun is out all week,’ the sort of shame akin to that which builds across Ilya Kaminsky’s viral poem We Lived Happily During the War . It is a cumbersome grief we see, to be alive and well while others are in constant peril, such as in the poem Naturalize:
‘Nothing can justify why I'm alive.
Why there's still
a June. Why I wake and wake and the earth doesn't shake.’
There are even the struggles to process her own personal griefs in juxtaposition with the great mass of grief and violence on the news. She is often looking for this space, unsure where to turn, reminding us that this is a struggle we all often face and, in that shared grief, we carry one another's burdens together instead of holding up our own as if in competition for greater suffering.
‘I watch a woman
bury her child. How? I lost a fetus
and couldn’t eat breakfast for a week.
I watch a woman and the watching
is a crime.’
Included in this collection are two poems Alyan had previously in The New Yorker magazine addressing the violence in May of 2021 which killed just over 260 Palestinians— 67 of them were children who are remembered HERE— that convery the message of the title Half-Life in Exile (you can read the full poem HERE). It is a poem in which she examines the heavy burden of witness and grief—‘ I wrote the poem / after weeks of despair, hauling myself / like a rock’—yet the struggle to feel it has accomplished anything.
‘Everybody loves the poem.
It's embroidered on a pillow in Mil-waukee.
It's done nothing for Palestine.’
She writes about this at length in an article for Teen Vogue, What a Palestinian-American Wants You To Know About Dehumanization on how ‘art is not a replacement for policy. Poems will not save us. Poems will not save Gaza. I say that as a poet.’ Which is a similar struggle expressed in the poems of Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd who writes in his collection, Rifqa, ‘At a certain point, the metaphor tires. At a certain point, I’ll grab a brick.’ Though Alyan also balances this with the necessity of witness:
‘It is also true that poetry—and art and music and film—are offshoots of bearing witness: they fortify us, sustain us, especially in times of erasure. They help us rehearse empathy, and build the necessary muscle memory to call upon it regularly. They can also remind us what we’re doing and why, becoming useful as compasses, rest stops, places to sharpen our ideas and counter dissonance, to clarify our thinking, and our hearts, and to rest in community. They are where we unlearn stories, where we cut our tongues on new ones…
…Dialectically: a story isn’t enough, and one cannot triumph in any social justice struggle without examining the stories that have been turned into gospel. This is true for any project of imperialism, occupation, or persecution: narratives get us into them. Narratives will get us out.’
This is a key element of The Moon That Turns You Back, looking at the narratives as a way to process and to remember. For further reading, she also wrote an incredible article on processing grief while removed from Gaza in The Guardian last year.
‘Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don't interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage.
For what it's done to get here.’
The concept of remembering figures prominently across many of the collection’s topics and is often expressed in rather unique stylistic choices and framing. The poem Sleep Study No. 3 approaches clinical studies of sleep abnormalities to which she writes ‘It’s not night that’s the problem, it’s war’ and proceeds into the use of blacking out key words under the heading ‘this dark is a study on redaction.’ The blacking out, which feels like redacted military or government documents, shows a sense of repression. Alternatively, there is a segment of poems near the end addressing the struggles of being unable to bring a child to term that appear as emotionless hospital communications yet have key words written in bold that, when read on their own, form brief abstract poems. It feels like the opposite of blackout poems, instead of removing the words around it, she emphasizes them in order to protect the human and emotional weight otherwise drowned out in the cold and clinical. In her poem [Political] dialogue, she addresses a situation where she keeps it a secret that she never had the baby during a phone conversation with a distant relative–a reminder that we edit or remove sometimes as a sort of protections. And not only for ourselves, such as the mother carrying her children over a field of corpses shields their eyes thinking ‘I remember so you can forget’
‘I want to fight for a country even if
that country didn't want me even if
when my mother bought a patch of land & tried
to put my name on it they wouldn't let me
because my name is mv father's name
because he was born in Palestine and so
impossible and so I am fated to love what won't
have me you know the way our mothers did’
—from Brute?
Other fascinating experimental styles present here is a poem that offers a word bank to insert into the various blank spaces (which reminded me of standardized tests in high school) or Alyan’s poems titled Interactive Fiction which offer a sort of choose-your-own adventure style poem beginning with an opening line and offering three different perspectives to continue along. In one such poem—Windows—we can choose to examine the poem in the context of Fatima, Alyan’s grandmother who appears frequently in the collection, a ‘wife to three countries’ and through which Alyan explores themes of family and displacement. In the poem, the speaker dials a number and the reader can choose to have them call Fatima, Nadia, or nobody. If they choose Fatima, the poem continues ‘I call [Fatima] but it’s my own pocket that buzzes.’ This poem follows a series of Fatima poems in which Alyan writes ‘its beautiful to speak for her; she’s dead,’ and the phone ringing in her pocket is a creative way to address that she has internalized her grandmother and the family legacy.
‘I’d rather be alive than holy.
I don’t have time to write about the soul.
There are bodies to count. There’s a man
Wearing his wedding tuxedo in case
I meet God and there’s a brick of light
Before each bombing.’
—from The Interviewer Wants to Know About Fashion
This is quite the emotionally intense collection with deep dives into many painful but necessary confrontations with grief and sorrow and while we may feel bogged down by the weight of the world, these poems still soar. Not all is dark here too, with some lovely lines about love saying ‘I circle you like a devoted planet,’ quips like ‘I want my stars sexy,’ or the rather gorgeous In the love poem on an imagined life where all the small inconveniences up to great griefs never happen and we can cozily reside in love. With heartfelt power, empathy and grace, The Moon That Turns You Back is an excellent volume of poetry from a marvelous poet.
4.5/5
‘You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I'm here to tell you the tide will never
stop coming in.
I'm here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.’
September 12, 2024
Hala Alyan does an excellent job using creative techniques to write about displacement and diaspora specifically relating to Palestine as well as some more personal struggles she has had with womanhood, most specifically her journey with motherhood. I foundt that her poems about diaspora and the women in previous generations of her family were the most touching and powerful, while the ones that strayed away from Palestine and being the child of refugees were less powerful to me. Overall, this was an excellent poetry collection and used some unique methods--some that I really loved (the “choose your own adventure” style poems), and somes that I didn’t love as much (the medical records ones).
Here are some excerpts from my favorites:
From “They Both Die on Mondays in April”:
“…
I am never paying attention. I cried because
Fatima was already half-gone, because Nadia
would later say I was the happiest bride she’d
ever seen, because I didn’t recognize
the photographs, because I left the wrong country,
but hasn’t everything already happened somewhere?
Aren’t we all waiting like unrung bells, and
hadn’t Fatima already died that night,
and Nadia too, and the city, and the house, and
in that hotel bed, in that flesh that is their
flesh, in that bone that is their bone, their
every season, wasn’t I only remembering?”
From “Half-Life in Exile”:
“...
Everybody loves the poem.
It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwauke,
It’s done nothing for Palestine.
…
The plants are called fire-followers,
but sometimes they grow after the rains. At night,
I am a zombie feeding on the comments.
Is it compulsive to watch videos?
Is it compulsive to memorize names?
Rafif and Amir and Mahmoud.
Poppies and snapdragons and calandrinias:
I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you under the missiles.
A plant waits for fire to grow.
A child waits for a siren. It must be a child.
Never a man. Never a man without a child.
There is nothing more terrible
than waiting for the terrible. I promise.
Was the grief worth the poem? No,
but you don’t interrogate a weed
for what it does with wreckage.
For what it’s done to get here.”
From “Brute”:
“...
I want to fight for a country even if
that country didn’t want me even if
when my mother bought a patch of land & tried
to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me
because my name is my father’s name
because he was born in Palestine and so
impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t
have me you know the way our mothers did”
Here are some excerpts from my favorites:
From “They Both Die on Mondays in April”:
“…
I am never paying attention. I cried because
Fatima was already half-gone, because Nadia
would later say I was the happiest bride she’d
ever seen, because I didn’t recognize
the photographs, because I left the wrong country,
but hasn’t everything already happened somewhere?
Aren’t we all waiting like unrung bells, and
hadn’t Fatima already died that night,
and Nadia too, and the city, and the house, and
in that hotel bed, in that flesh that is their
flesh, in that bone that is their bone, their
every season, wasn’t I only remembering?”
From “Half-Life in Exile”:
“...
Everybody loves the poem.
It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwauke,
It’s done nothing for Palestine.
…
The plants are called fire-followers,
but sometimes they grow after the rains. At night,
I am a zombie feeding on the comments.
Is it compulsive to watch videos?
Is it compulsive to memorize names?
Rafif and Amir and Mahmoud.
Poppies and snapdragons and calandrinias:
I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you under the missiles.
A plant waits for fire to grow.
A child waits for a siren. It must be a child.
Never a man. Never a man without a child.
There is nothing more terrible
than waiting for the terrible. I promise.
Was the grief worth the poem? No,
but you don’t interrogate a weed
for what it does with wreckage.
For what it’s done to get here.”
From “Brute”:
“...
I want to fight for a country even if
that country didn’t want me even if
when my mother bought a patch of land & tried
to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me
because my name is my father’s name
because he was born in Palestine and so
impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t
have me you know the way our mothers did”
February 11, 2024
Hala Alyan what a great collection of poems. I usually don't care for poetry, but this collection of poems really touched my heart and soul. I read a few poems each day. They really stuck with me. I will be buying this wonderful book to give as gifts to my friends and family. Highly recommend.
March 9, 2024
Some really interesting stuff here with past and future generations, home and belonging. She also does cool formal stuff with the way poems are constructed. The ghazals were my faves. A few poems really hit and a few didn’t and the rest were solid.
May 14, 2024
Hala Alyan yet again reminds me why she is one of my favorite poets. In each of her collections, I find that her craft is once again re-examined and refined. This collection was no different as she incorporated more experimental structures and even creates a sort-of "choose-your-own-adventure" format for some of the poems. I found this to be her most interactive collection yet and it feels so very intentional considering the overarching theme of disconnection. The disconnections in this book revolve around memory, displacement of Palestinians, nostalgia, finding belonging both with others and within ourselves. It felt like an appeal to the reader to connect with themselves and the world around them as well as to reflect on all the terrible parts of being alive that we are living through and watching unfold through TV or phone screens. For this reason, this is a collection I will return to in the future maybe for preservation of memory, or reflection on the perseverance of Palestinians both in Palestine and in the diaspora. Hopefully, one day I will return to this collection at a time when Palestine will be free.
Thank you to the Publisher, Ecco, for an advanced reader's e-arc via NetGalley. All opinions shared in this review are my own.
Thank you to the Publisher, Ecco, for an advanced reader's e-arc via NetGalley. All opinions shared in this review are my own.
October 21, 2023
A gut-wrenching, moving, and riveting collection from Hala Alyan. I recommend reading these poems over the course of several days to let them really wash over you. Give every single word space to sink in.
April 18, 2024
this collection of poems was on literaryhub's most anticipated reads and i was most excited to read from a palestinian-american poet to read about displacement, violence, diasporas, fears and indirectly the on-going genocide in palestine.
in a space and time bending haze, we hop from beirut, damascus, basra, jerusalem in the west bank, dubai - all over the middle east. it's a hard read for those who are particularly sensitive to that awful feeling of divorce between a person and their people/home... but i have to admit that the poems themselves, while i deeply appreciated their raw and haunting content, didn't always sit with me in their formats. for me, some were hits, some misses.
the range of which hala alyan is reaching, is of noble intention but there is this zoom-in and zoom-out that felt slightly awkward to me between poems. the polyvocality ( - the perfect word another review has used for these poems, i fear -) hasn't been nailed perfectly. nothing major but it's remarkable to me. this sometimes would tie to the poems that were must more visually striking and/or interactive - which is the most i have ever read, by the way. it was creative to add these "fill the blank" forms as a poem, a true play with page design. but i personally am more about the word play within the words or a simple text. these interactive poems were interesting but in my case, i failed to see the pertinence or the pleasure in having to solve these. not bcs i don't love a puzzle - i love a puzzle - but bcs i can easily misconstrue, bcs i have to probe and poke and play with the words and the sentences, and bcs whatever i came up with, just might not be the "correct" or the "true" order. and perhaps that was the beauty in it. but for my little plausibly neurodivergent brain, the poems would lose their charm bcs i would be preoccupied with the puzzle than with the words and the message or the poem. the worry and the exponential possibilities would tick tick tick in back of my head and whine to me "what if you didn't read it right?". and so that took away alot during my reading.
long story short, while i really appreciated the creative effort and the content, it did landed awkwardly with me and i left the poem collection feeling nervous about the correctness of my order during those interactive poems.
in a space and time bending haze, we hop from beirut, damascus, basra, jerusalem in the west bank, dubai - all over the middle east. it's a hard read for those who are particularly sensitive to that awful feeling of divorce between a person and their people/home... but i have to admit that the poems themselves, while i deeply appreciated their raw and haunting content, didn't always sit with me in their formats. for me, some were hits, some misses.
the range of which hala alyan is reaching, is of noble intention but there is this zoom-in and zoom-out that felt slightly awkward to me between poems. the polyvocality ( - the perfect word another review has used for these poems, i fear -) hasn't been nailed perfectly. nothing major but it's remarkable to me. this sometimes would tie to the poems that were must more visually striking and/or interactive - which is the most i have ever read, by the way. it was creative to add these "fill the blank" forms as a poem, a true play with page design. but i personally am more about the word play within the words or a simple text. these interactive poems were interesting but in my case, i failed to see the pertinence or the pleasure in having to solve these. not bcs i don't love a puzzle - i love a puzzle - but bcs i can easily misconstrue, bcs i have to probe and poke and play with the words and the sentences, and bcs whatever i came up with, just might not be the "correct" or the "true" order. and perhaps that was the beauty in it. but for my little plausibly neurodivergent brain, the poems would lose their charm bcs i would be preoccupied with the puzzle than with the words and the message or the poem. the worry and the exponential possibilities would tick tick tick in back of my head and whine to me "what if you didn't read it right?". and so that took away alot during my reading.
long story short, while i really appreciated the creative effort and the content, it did landed awkwardly with me and i left the poem collection feeling nervous about the correctness of my order during those interactive poems.
May 6, 2024
3.5 ⭐️
January 25, 2024
“A good house can carry anguish, and this is how I think of bodies now, too.”
Displacement causes immense confusion: whether that’s displacement from your home, your spouse, your family, or your gender. The Moon that Turns You Back captures this idea perfectly through one of the most impactful poetry collections I have ever read.
The collection perfectly dissects grief, the realities of womanhood, marriage, and so much more in less than 120 pages. Each poem changes format and form as Hala Alyan puts her incredible creativity on display. I was never bored and I never wanted to put the book down. My favorite changes of form were the poems that became a “choose your own adventure” of sorts in which Alyan allows her reader to participate and decide what the next word will be. These poems, in particular, captured the idea of how displacement causes these shifting memories and narratives throughout one’s life.
If you are looking for a book that captures the emotions of being Palestinian during this moment in time, this is the book for you.
If you are looking for a book that captures the shifting emotions of marriage, this is the book for you.
If you are looking for a poetry collection that reinvents what poetry can be, this book is for you!
This collection comes out on March 12th, 2024 and I highly recommend pre-ordering it soon because it is not a book you’ll want to miss!
Thank you so much to Hala Alyan and Netgalley for giving me access to this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Displacement causes immense confusion: whether that’s displacement from your home, your spouse, your family, or your gender. The Moon that Turns You Back captures this idea perfectly through one of the most impactful poetry collections I have ever read.
The collection perfectly dissects grief, the realities of womanhood, marriage, and so much more in less than 120 pages. Each poem changes format and form as Hala Alyan puts her incredible creativity on display. I was never bored and I never wanted to put the book down. My favorite changes of form were the poems that became a “choose your own adventure” of sorts in which Alyan allows her reader to participate and decide what the next word will be. These poems, in particular, captured the idea of how displacement causes these shifting memories and narratives throughout one’s life.
If you are looking for a book that captures the emotions of being Palestinian during this moment in time, this is the book for you.
If you are looking for a book that captures the shifting emotions of marriage, this is the book for you.
If you are looking for a poetry collection that reinvents what poetry can be, this book is for you!
This collection comes out on March 12th, 2024 and I highly recommend pre-ordering it soon because it is not a book you’ll want to miss!
Thank you so much to Hala Alyan and Netgalley for giving me access to this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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February 29, 2024POETRY COLLECTION • COMING SOON
Thank you #partner @eccobooks for my #gifted copy
The Moon That Turns You Back
Hala Alyan
3/12
💭 This is hard to review... I'll be the first to admit that poetry is sometimes over my head. I don't always know what the poet is trying to say, and maybe that's ok, because I don't think poets write for other people. So while some of the poems here were easy to discern, others felt too obscure for me to grasp their message. Though one thing is immensely clear: Alyan's poetry is full of feeling: anger, love, loss, and discontentment. And I absolutely understood that Alyan is grappling with the instability of displacement, and being torn between her homeland the place she lives. Written in varying formats and uniquely structured, The Moon That Turns You Back is a beautiful, touching, deeply intimate collection that I recommend wholeheartedly.
As someone who typically cruises through books, I really appreciate the way this book made me take my time.
📌 Coming March 12th!
Thank you #partner @eccobooks for my #gifted copy
The Moon That Turns You Back
Hala Alyan
3/12
💭 This is hard to review... I'll be the first to admit that poetry is sometimes over my head. I don't always know what the poet is trying to say, and maybe that's ok, because I don't think poets write for other people. So while some of the poems here were easy to discern, others felt too obscure for me to grasp their message. Though one thing is immensely clear: Alyan's poetry is full of feeling: anger, love, loss, and discontentment. And I absolutely understood that Alyan is grappling with the instability of displacement, and being torn between her homeland the place she lives. Written in varying formats and uniquely structured, The Moon That Turns You Back is a beautiful, touching, deeply intimate collection that I recommend wholeheartedly.
As someone who typically cruises through books, I really appreciate the way this book made me take my time.
📌 Coming March 12th!
March 4, 2024
I received an ARC from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
The Moon That Turns You Back is a collection of poetry by Palestinian-American Hala Alyan. From my personal reading, displacement is the ubiquitous theme in all of the poems. The idea of displacement manifests in different ways in this book. The most common form is of course geographic displacement. But there is also the displacement that takes place within the self and within the self’s body.
Hala Alyan revisits a myriad of fragmented memories in this collection–memories tied to nostalgia, grief, displacement, and womanhood.
The poems about nostalgia and grief go hand in hand, as the author talks about her grandmother Fatima. I really connected with these poems because they reminded me of my own grandmother; her house, her hands, her cooking, her smell. All of my senses were engaged. Whenever the author talked about Fatima, my own nostalgia was triggered, and it felt like I was opening an archive of fragmented memories related to my grandmother. It felt like I was seeing a glimpse of my own grandmother.
You can truly feel the author’s raw and unfiltered feelings, and her vulnerability, as she puts herself out there and talks about her experiences with miscarriage, how it felt like displacement within her body. These personal anecdotes are also contrasted with Palestinian women, mothers, burying their children killed by isr**li bombs.
The poems are structured in various creative formats. There are interactive poems, which I thought were super cool. A reviewer aptly described these interactive poems as a “choose your own adventure” type of poetry. I have never ready poetry in this format before, so I found the experience invigorating.
I guess the only thing I didn’t really understand was the theme of religion. I found it confusing. I had a hard time dissecting the author’s meaning with the various religious allusions.
I didn’t expect this review to be so personal, but here we are. I always struggle with writing proper reviews for Palestinian books and poetry because I feel like my words cannot really do them justice. But I hope that the personal anecdotes struck a chord with you and encourage you to pick up this book.
The Moon That Turns You Back is a collection of poetry by Palestinian-American Hala Alyan. From my personal reading, displacement is the ubiquitous theme in all of the poems. The idea of displacement manifests in different ways in this book. The most common form is of course geographic displacement. But there is also the displacement that takes place within the self and within the self’s body.
Hala Alyan revisits a myriad of fragmented memories in this collection–memories tied to nostalgia, grief, displacement, and womanhood.
The poems about nostalgia and grief go hand in hand, as the author talks about her grandmother Fatima. I really connected with these poems because they reminded me of my own grandmother; her house, her hands, her cooking, her smell. All of my senses were engaged. Whenever the author talked about Fatima, my own nostalgia was triggered, and it felt like I was opening an archive of fragmented memories related to my grandmother. It felt like I was seeing a glimpse of my own grandmother.
You can truly feel the author’s raw and unfiltered feelings, and her vulnerability, as she puts herself out there and talks about her experiences with miscarriage, how it felt like displacement within her body. These personal anecdotes are also contrasted with Palestinian women, mothers, burying their children killed by isr**li bombs.
The poems are structured in various creative formats. There are interactive poems, which I thought were super cool. A reviewer aptly described these interactive poems as a “choose your own adventure” type of poetry. I have never ready poetry in this format before, so I found the experience invigorating.
I guess the only thing I didn’t really understand was the theme of religion. I found it confusing. I had a hard time dissecting the author’s meaning with the various religious allusions.
I didn’t expect this review to be so personal, but here we are. I always struggle with writing proper reviews for Palestinian books and poetry because I feel like my words cannot really do them justice. But I hope that the personal anecdotes struck a chord with you and encourage you to pick up this book.
July 2, 2024
3.5 rounded up. Enjoyed this collection overall, some were more abstract then I like in poetry, but still full of lovely and beautiful language.
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October 25, 2024A lot of pain, poignantly expressed.
June 4, 2024
The Moon That Turns You Back is the first thing I'm reading from Hala Alyan, although she has been on my radar for a while (mostly for her novels). I love poetry and I don't think I've read any new releases this year yet, so I figured this would be a good one to start with. I very much enjoyed this collection.
Before I dive into my thoughts, I did just want to share that I listened to this as an audiobook read by the poet herself. While I have gotten a lot better at absorbing audiobooks and listen to a lot of them now, this has only been in the last few years. I've only ever listened to a couple of poetry audiobooks ever, and those weren't in the time since I gained more skill as an audio reader. Honestly, I definitely still don't feel like I absorb poetry through audio as well as I would like to, or as well as I do through written text. To me this says that I need to be trying it more often (even if not all the time) so that I can build up those skills. This may be a collection I need to read with my eyes or reread through audio later on to get the most of, simply because I just don't think I got as much from it as I normally do from poetry. It's a skill issue on my part, and it's not a reflection on Hala Alyan.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this collection. Many of the poems have themes of womanhood and Palestinian diasporic identity. I think my favourite poems in this collection were the ones that addressed Alyan's struggles with infertility, including multiple miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy. While I find it harder to point out favourite poems or passages from the audio, I did record a part that really spoke to me: "you looked at me strange and said a good house can carry anguish and this is how I think of bodies now too."
Overall, I would definitely recommend this one, and I'd be interested in rereading it and exploring more poetry and novels from the author.
Before I dive into my thoughts, I did just want to share that I listened to this as an audiobook read by the poet herself. While I have gotten a lot better at absorbing audiobooks and listen to a lot of them now, this has only been in the last few years. I've only ever listened to a couple of poetry audiobooks ever, and those weren't in the time since I gained more skill as an audio reader. Honestly, I definitely still don't feel like I absorb poetry through audio as well as I would like to, or as well as I do through written text. To me this says that I need to be trying it more often (even if not all the time) so that I can build up those skills. This may be a collection I need to read with my eyes or reread through audio later on to get the most of, simply because I just don't think I got as much from it as I normally do from poetry. It's a skill issue on my part, and it's not a reflection on Hala Alyan.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this collection. Many of the poems have themes of womanhood and Palestinian diasporic identity. I think my favourite poems in this collection were the ones that addressed Alyan's struggles with infertility, including multiple miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy. While I find it harder to point out favourite poems or passages from the audio, I did record a part that really spoke to me: "you looked at me strange and said a good house can carry anguish and this is how I think of bodies now too."
Overall, I would definitely recommend this one, and I'd be interested in rereading it and exploring more poetry and novels from the author.
October 30, 2024
“The cost of wanting something is who you are on the other side of getting it.”
Probably the most powerful collection of poetry I’ve read all year. This one took me a while to get through, as it really packs a punch and it took me some time to let each one read stay with me. The exploration through the self, the familial, and the communal helped to place emphasis on the various themes throughout.
TW: Miscarriage, spontaneous abortion. The latter quarter or so of the collection was an incredibly noteworthy and visceral mix of word and media to page. Including typed doctor’s notes, medical scans, etc/whatever you want to call them is something I’ve never seen done before when discussing the aforementioned TW’s. Truly heartbreaking, but such a forceful display of saying “look at my pain the exact way I had to look at it.”
Probably the most powerful collection of poetry I’ve read all year. This one took me a while to get through, as it really packs a punch and it took me some time to let each one read stay with me. The exploration through the self, the familial, and the communal helped to place emphasis on the various themes throughout.
TW: Miscarriage, spontaneous abortion. The latter quarter or so of the collection was an incredibly noteworthy and visceral mix of word and media to page. Including typed doctor’s notes, medical scans, etc/whatever you want to call them is something I’ve never seen done before when discussing the aforementioned TW’s. Truly heartbreaking, but such a forceful display of saying “look at my pain the exact way I had to look at it.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 1, 2024
We just bought this house, I wanted to be happy in it, // and you looked at me strange and said, A good house can carry anguish, and this is how I think of bodies now too
ARE U KIDDING
ARE U KIDDING
June 1, 2024
[5 stars] The Moon That Turns You Back is a powerful poetry collection that asks questions about home amidst displacement, diaspora, infertility, and global struggle. The precision and beauty of Palestinian-American multi-genre writer Hala Alyan's words invite you to consider and reconsider what it means to belong - to a country, to a people, to one's own body - as you trace back across borders and expectations. I love the breadth of form here, and although I enjoyed hearing Alyan recite them herself at a recent reading, would really encourage folks to seek out the print if possible for its visual medium. My favorite pieces were STRIKE [AIR], NATURALIZED, TOPOGRAPHY, REMAINS, THE INTERVIEWER WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT FASHION, LOVE POEM, BORE, APRIL MAY JUNE JULY, SPOILER, and FIXATION. Highly recommended for prospective and existing fans of experimental poetics, diasporic feminisms, and Palestinian artistic narratives.
Publication Info: Ecco / Harper Collins (March 2024)
Goodreads Challenge 2024: 21/48 (read 5/27/2024)
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge: read a book and attend a related event
Popsugar Reading Challenge: recommended by a bookseller
CN / TW: descriptions and mentions of miscarriage, war, racism, sexism, and genocide
Publication Info: Ecco / Harper Collins (March 2024)
Goodreads Challenge 2024: 21/48 (read 5/27/2024)
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge: read a book and attend a related event
Popsugar Reading Challenge: recommended by a bookseller
CN / TW: descriptions and mentions of miscarriage, war, racism, sexism, and genocide
February 9, 2024
Setting up my year for poetry up with HIGH STANDARDS. Plus, here's a small way to support a Palestinian poet!
March 20, 2024
stunning as always. hala alyan has never disappointed me. gripping, devastating. finished this collection in one sitting.
May 19, 2024
A little too messy for my liking
April 14, 2024
Beautiful work. I'm not a person that frequents poetry so I try to digest each piece as much as possible.
TW: miscarriage, grief, war, racism, genocide
I appreciate how vulnerable Hala is in her poetry. As a woman who has dealt with things such as infertility and a miscarriage, it felt gut-wrenching at times. If you listen to this audio style, Hala's work reminds me of Carmen Maria Machado's. It's sincere and open. Hala shares with us her experience living in the diaspora of Palestine. It's complicated, frustrating, heartbreaking, and intense. With such short pages, Hala gave a great description.
TW: miscarriage, grief, war, racism, genocide
I appreciate how vulnerable Hala is in her poetry. As a woman who has dealt with things such as infertility and a miscarriage, it felt gut-wrenching at times. If you listen to this audio style, Hala's work reminds me of Carmen Maria Machado's. It's sincere and open. Hala shares with us her experience living in the diaspora of Palestine. It's complicated, frustrating, heartbreaking, and intense. With such short pages, Hala gave a great description.
June 1, 2024
I burn but that’s the only way to the lilacs. whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful
October 4, 2024
I think I’m just not into poetry
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September 8, 2024I can’t rate poetry. It’s personal and raw and beautiful.
August 18, 2024
This was a random pull from the shelf. The first poem had me hooked. The book is full of grief and beauty. It's like seeing my body in a different person. Internal scars, uterus trauma. Free Palestine. So many Palestinian poets are dead now. Killed this year because they were anyone. Some poems made me sob uncontrollably. And still they help me make peace.
June 2, 2024
Love this collection. And what fantastic last lines:
“I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.”
“I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.”
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May 24, 2024Book 1 of Asian Readathon: Read an underrated book
March 11, 2024
Tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem, Alyan seamlessly blends mundane activities and geopolitical brutalities to show her desire for home and stability after displacement from her homeland and body.
I love how Alyan plays with structures, from interactive poetry to using coding language (I think it's Python, but let me know if I'm wrong). THE MOON THAT TURNS YOU BACK is ingenious, heartfelt, and, at times, heartbreaking.
My favorites in this collection are: Interactive Fiction, Remains, The interviewer wants to know about fashion, The year is, Brute?, Love Poem, and Naturalized.
I love how Alyan plays with structures, from interactive poetry to using coding language (I think it's Python, but let me know if I'm wrong). THE MOON THAT TURNS YOU BACK is ingenious, heartfelt, and, at times, heartbreaking.
My favorites in this collection are: Interactive Fiction, Remains, The interviewer wants to know about fashion, The year is, Brute?, Love Poem, and Naturalized.
August 6, 2024
Everybody loves the poem.
It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee.
It’s done nothing for Palestine.
—from “Half-Life in Exile”
here as in “The Twenty-Ninth Year” (which apparently I listened to on AUDIO??? wild), Alyan writes with grief from her positionality as a Palestinian American and explores the often fraught nature of what it means to be a diasporic Palestinian. see, for example, “Self-Portrait as my Mother”, and this passage from “Naturalized”:
My father plays soccer. It’s so hot in Gaza.
It’s so hot under that hospital elevator.
That’s no place for a child’s braid. In the staff meeting,
I stretch my teeth into a country
when they congratulate me on the ceasefire.
As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath.
As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic.
It’s okay. They like me. They like me in a coffin.
unlike in her earlier poetry, an even more prevalent topic of exploration in this collection is her history of infertility, miscarriages, and ectopic and heterotopic pregnancies, and she follows up a poem titled “The Uterus Speaks” (I married death every month. I grew inside your mother inside her mother. / I’ve been waiting: your evil eye, your dime-store voodoo, // the two million eggs I burn like Vegas money.) with another titled “The Amygdala Speaks” (even hijackers get it right sometimes / don’t you hear that backfiring engine / don’t you want to cry when your mama cries / you forget i’m not your side bitch).
very interesting are the poems categorized by Alyan as “interactive fiction,” each of which follows the same structure, which Aaron A. Reed calls “a minimalist Branch and Bottleneck.” available to read online are “Interactive :: House Saints” and “Interactive Fiction :: Expats.”
[...] On the other
side of the world, God’s
house begins to burn
and I dress myself by that light.
—from “Interactive Fiction :: Windows”
my favorite of these might be “Interactive Fiction :: Werewolf,” which ends with the following trio of possibilities: there is / always the wolf that / breaks you and the wolf // that turns you back; my tongue a sprig of / silver, a comet, the bullet // that turns you back; I / wait for the / moon // that turns you back.
many people have noted the final lines of the final poem, “Spoiler,” and rightfully so; they are powerful. however, I found this particular section of that same poem even more so:
The nightmares have stopped, I tell the doctor. I know why.
They stopped because I baptized them. This is how my mother
and I speak of dying—the thing you turn away by letting in.
while I can’t rate this quite as highly as I did “The Twenty-Ninth Year” (which, to be clear, may not actually be a reflection on the quality of this collection in comparison with that one; it may simply say something about how I have changed as a reader in the past two years, or the medium through which I read the two books, or any number of other factors, up to and including the angle of the moon in scorpio or whatever), but I still think it’s a strong collection, and I will absolutely continue reading Alyan’s work as it is published. I also think I’ll go back to those earliest collections of hers which I have not yet read and read them while I wait for more. Hala Alyan completionist! Hala Alyan completionist!
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February 20, 2024disclaimer: I don’t really give starred reviews. I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not. Find me here: https://linktr.ee/bookishmillennial
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC!
This was a powerful, devastating collection of poetry and I highly recommend it. I'll include some excerpts from poems that stood out the most to me below (some of the formatting will be different as I copy and paste, so please excuse that - you should absolutely read this for yourself and grab yourself a copy to be able to experience it as it should be formatted!)
Remains
my grandmother kept four tablecloths in a cabinet the color of bones in a city named after wells which is where my mother calls country which is where my mother calls me American which is where we left that tablecloth damask named after Damascus which is where men steered their ships which is where men bought silk yards and rivers and wheels of it which is where my grandmother was born not Latakia which is where she lived or Kuwait which is where she married or Beirut which is where she is now bone
The interviewer wants to know about fashion
Think of all the calla lilies. Think of all the words that rhyme with calla. Isn’t it a miracle that they come back? The flowers. The dead. I watch a woman bury her child. How? I lost a fetus and couldn’t eat breakfast for a week. I watch a woman and the watching is a crime. I return my eyes. The sea foams like a dog. What’s five thousand miles between friends? If you listen close enough, you can hear the earth crack like a neck. Be lucky. Try to make it to the morning. Try to find your heart in the newsprint. Please. I’d rather be alive than holy.
The year is
Baba, we’ve been disappointing our fathers for centuries. I know you understand.
Topography
On the telephone, your grandfather tells you the land is coating his eyes. He tells you it is worth being alive just to see that blue. He dies and they harness his body to the dirt. He dies and the sun is out all week.
Half-Life in Exile
There is nothing more terrible than waiting for the terrible. I promise. Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don’t interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage. For what it’s done to get here.
When They Say Pledge Allegiance, I Say
it is 2006 and my grandparents won’t evacuate // won’t leave another war // and all summer I dream of floods // collect bullets and love the wrong person
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief and War
Moderate: Violence, Racism, and Abandonment
Minor: Genocide
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC!
This was a powerful, devastating collection of poetry and I highly recommend it. I'll include some excerpts from poems that stood out the most to me below (some of the formatting will be different as I copy and paste, so please excuse that - you should absolutely read this for yourself and grab yourself a copy to be able to experience it as it should be formatted!)
Remains
my grandmother kept four tablecloths in a cabinet the color of bones in a city named after wells which is where my mother calls country which is where my mother calls me American which is where we left that tablecloth damask named after Damascus which is where men steered their ships which is where men bought silk yards and rivers and wheels of it which is where my grandmother was born not Latakia which is where she lived or Kuwait which is where she married or Beirut which is where she is now bone
The interviewer wants to know about fashion
Think of all the calla lilies. Think of all the words that rhyme with calla. Isn’t it a miracle that they come back? The flowers. The dead. I watch a woman bury her child. How? I lost a fetus and couldn’t eat breakfast for a week. I watch a woman and the watching is a crime. I return my eyes. The sea foams like a dog. What’s five thousand miles between friends? If you listen close enough, you can hear the earth crack like a neck. Be lucky. Try to make it to the morning. Try to find your heart in the newsprint. Please. I’d rather be alive than holy.
The year is
Baba, we’ve been disappointing our fathers for centuries. I know you understand.
Topography
On the telephone, your grandfather tells you the land is coating his eyes. He tells you it is worth being alive just to see that blue. He dies and they harness his body to the dirt. He dies and the sun is out all week.
Half-Life in Exile
There is nothing more terrible than waiting for the terrible. I promise. Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don’t interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage. For what it’s done to get here.
When They Say Pledge Allegiance, I Say
it is 2006 and my grandparents won’t evacuate // won’t leave another war // and all summer I dream of floods // collect bullets and love the wrong person
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief and War
Moderate: Violence, Racism, and Abandonment
Minor: Genocide
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