The Moon That Turns You Back

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“Forgetting something doesn’t change it,” writes Hala Alyan, a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist.

The Moon That Turns You Back book cover

At the heart of Hala Alyan’s fifth collection of poetry lies a single, persistent question: What does it mean to transform into something unrecognizable—and what are the things that can bring us back?

Hala Alyan headshot

Ms. Alyan is the author of two novels, The Arsonists’ City and Salt Houses, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award. Her four previous collections of poetry include Atrium and The Twenty-Ninth Year.

Because a Hala Alyan poem is a startlingly frank, stunningly beautiful missive (never missile) that goes straight to the white-hot heart of things.

“My relationship to poetry mirrors my relationship to truth.” Listen to the Living Writers interview with Hala Alyan here.

Hala Alyan at Colgate

Join us in person or via Zoom on Thursday, Sept. 5, for Hala Alyan’s reading and book-signing. All Living Writers events take place at 4:30 p.m. EST in Persson Auditorium. Refreshments available.

Go Beyond the Book

  • “The call to witness, and the responsibility that such a position brings, runs through [Hala Alyan’s] latest book of poetry,” writes Anthony Alessandrini in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  • “We have been let into the lives of the people in Gaza in the most awful, intimate ways,” writes Ms. Alyan in this essay for The Guardian, “I Am Not There and I Am Not Here.” 
  • “Once I started writing, I felt I could not stop,” says Ms. Alyan, in this interview about connecting with home through storytelling.

“Please. I’d rather be alive than holy.
I don’t have time to write about the soul.
There are bodies to count.”

Hala Alyan, "The Interviewer Wants to Know about Fashion"