WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: March 20, 2024

Hala Alyan’s The Moon That Turns You Back was published this month by Harper Collins. Alyan is an Palestinian American poet who explores violence, displacement, and loss. She uses a myriad of inventive poetic forms to contain diaspora and resilience in the face of war. 

In “Half-Life in Exile,” she writes:

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.

For examples of her work, here is a lineated poem “September, a week in” and a fierce prose poem “Habituation” which contains my favorite passage in the book but hasn’t the story already changed because I told it:

https://www.thrushpoetryjournal.com/january-2020-hala-alyan.html

Congratulations, Hala!

 

Comments

[Nin Andrews]

Beautiful poems! Thanks for posting about Hala!!