The moon that turns you back

Alyan's fifth book of poetry grapples heroically with the fissures of family and lineage caused by displacement and migration. One poem relates the dispersal of siblings across Jerusalem, Egypt, Lebanon, and Kuwait and poses a poignant, heartbreaking question, "See how a father sprawls his sons like kindling?" Other inquiries conjure haunting imagery ("Can you believe the apple trees this year? / Pink as slaughter") and cast corporeal shadows against the sky, "A body is a calendar of // breaths // one laid inside the other / like a carapace. Do you / hear all that red?" "Tonight I'll Dream of Nadia" twists disparate locales--hair salon, hospital, nightclub--into a sweeping cyclone of affinity and affirmation as an uncle on the dance floor exclaims, "I love my people," and the speaker adds, "I am / everyone's daughter, everyone's wife." One of the book's finest poems, "Topography," figures the contours of a family and the homeland they call Palestine, where the land is a lemon that burns the esophagus; it blows into the eyes, gets under the nails. When the speaker's grandfather passes away, "they harness his body to the dirt. / He dies and the sun is out all week." A sterling entry in this writer's exciting oeuvre.

The formally inventive and devastatingly evocative latest from Alyan (The Twenty-Ninth Year) reckons with grief, displacement, and enduring kinship. From Beirut to the U.S. to Jerusalem to Kuwait, Alyan draws from her experience as a Palestinian American to examine where one's home is under occupation and forced displacement. An interaction with an Israeli soldier in Jerusalem, in which her passport is withheld until she agrees to take her hair down, is referenced repeatedly, evoking the helplessness of the occupied. Alyan's ghazals are the jewels of the collection. In "Fatima :: Dust Ghazal," the speaker has married "Salim with the long neck," and in the process "became wife to three countries." There's plenty of joy--and defiance--in these pages. In "Tonight I'll Dream of Nadia," the speaker experiences the pleasure of being with her family when a loved one is in the hospital on a ventilator. At the poem's end, she is in a nightclub: "I am/ everyone's daughter, everyone's wife, I muscle/ through the crowd to dance, I feel her hand in/ my hair as the machine breathes for us both." These powerful poems linger long in the mind. (Mar.)