Isn’t 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…
From “The Interviewer Wants to Know About Fashion”
The Moon That Turns You Back, by Hala Alyan, is so good it defies the blurb. This is an intensely emotional and inventive book, one that resonates as much with those who struggle to conceive as it does with those trying to survive under colonial violence. Alyan expertly navigates between traditional verse and conceptualism, demonstrating how in tune she is with recent shifts in American poetics. The Moon That Turns You Back is a wrenching, fraught collection, one that will require processing time for readers, but also one that leans toward healing, if only through our shared losses—of children, of homeland, of loved ones near and far.
Alyan opens her most recent collection with an inventive form that trades on the multiplicity of the contrapuntal and the engagement tactics of choose-your-own-adventure stories. “Interactive Fiction: House Saints” is one of several poems throughout the book that use Alyan’s form, which contains a single line of verse followed by three columns of stanzas, each separated by a set of vertical lines. On the second page of each “Interactive Fiction” poem, readers encounter another line of verse and three columns of stanzas, but also a final stand-alone line of verse below the columns. Readers can choose how they want to read the poem, and each route develops a related but notably unique experience.
For example, “Interactive Fiction: House Saints” begins with the line, “I want a miracle that makes me ordinary:” Depending on which route readers take, the poem continues in one of three ways: “I want the miracle that makes me ordinary:/to kiss/the back of her hand/I pray to the rain…,” or “I want the miracle that makes me ordinary:/to resurrect/into a forked river. The/mountain saints are gone,…” or “I want the miracle that makes me ordinary:/to leave/with the//blackbirds.” The form echoes one of the central themes, namely the poet’s movement between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Alyan uses material space to further emphasize the complexities of living in diaspora, the ways in which each life and history is simultaneously a part of the story and distinctly separate from one another.
At the core of The Moon That Turns You Back is the inability to conceive. Alyan includes dozens of poems that address miscarriage, spontaneous abortion, uterine issues—these poems turn the body into a site of rejection that mirrors the countries and occupied territories that reject the vivid characters who occupy the poems. These two themes collide in “(Political) Dialogue,” where the speaker admits, “On the phone, Meimei would ask about my/son,/if he was eating solids yet. There were/two worlds then, the one we lived in and the/one she invented…” The invented world is full of hope—the speaker gives birth to her son and he thrives, visits Meimei every Sunday, returns to Palestine—while the one the speaker lives in is desolate, “there never was a son” and she never returns. The bracketed title invokes the correlation between political policy and despair, emphasizing that the “dialogue” is only apolitical insofar as the speaker does not tell the truth.
Alyan is uniquely skilled at her use of the page and form, as comfortable in strict ghazals as she is with found poetry and experimental forms. At times, traditional forms are neatly juxtaposed with experimentation, highlighting Alyan’s commitment to moving across boundaries and textual landscapes to communicate her experiences. “Habibti Ghazal” is set opposite “Love Poem,” for example; the former employs the ghazal strictly and sharply, while the latter is written in programming code and develops a program that will generate a random poem based on the specified parameters. “Habibti Ghazal” wonders, “Can I be my own habibti?” and pines, “Hello, almost wife./I can’t teach you about metaphor; I’m stuck in the future. O, habibti.” “Love Poem” produces numerous possibilities through its program, such as:
I love how Jerusalem taught me.
With eye or sea the bottle-green of photographs.
My startled heart unspooling like raw silk.
Everywhere: shouting and apricots and reconstructed light.
or
I love how Paris taught me.
With eye or sea the grain of photographs.
My gutless heart unspooling like raw silk.
Everywhere: shouting and apricots and reconstructed light.
Working in tandem, these poems demonstrate both the myriad ways that we love, but also the way interactions can either create or destroy a potential love at random.
The Moon That Turns You Back gutted me. It rearranged me. This is a collection I will return to again and again, personally and professionally. I don’t know how else to say it—everyone needs to read this book.