You can purchase The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan from Ecco Books here.
Alyan’s work is a foray of contemporariness and of navigating. Many of the poems offer more formal explorations of what needs be conveyed — with a series of poems in the form of six columns responding to lines adjusted by a unique subject, or more traditional formal modes like the repetition explored in “Strike [Air].” But what’s at stake here is the truth of the matter: that this world we suffer in is ridiculous and nonsensical in its cruelties. That violence shatters this world in places and leaves other places with only the most minor of scratches on its lens. You know, if the world were a mirror then what of us is being reflected back?
I think of this beautiful reading by Meredith Boe in the Chicago Review of books:
She questions order, cause and effect and how one terrible thing could possibly create something beautiful, how something beautiful could possibly be destroyed by something cruel.
And then there is helplessness in the face of war. Alyan writes of paying for a good mattress and getting Lasik alongside the lines, “You can’t put a corpse back together. / One bomb dives into the sky like a rose. / If I don’t say rose, you’ll skip ahead to the end.”
These poems weave in and out in this way—first a memory, then someone else’s memory, then secrets, then blurs of time, then directly addressing the reader.
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