Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
Menu
Photo by Dylan Sauerwein on Unsplash Palestinian American writer and poet Hala Alyan’s latest poetry collection is an inventive play with language and form as she writes into grief, infertility and a familial legacy fraught with the trauma of displacement and exile. Hala is warm when our call first connects and I launch into a confession: I’m intimidated by poets. She laughs and I tell her, it’s true because there’s something so powerful about maneuvering language, making the words mean, at once, what you want them to mean and what the reader would want them to mean. In The Moon That Turns You Back , Hala offers the reader more control with such meaning-making through interactive poems. In “Key”, she tells the reader, “Fill in the blank with a suitable word from the right” and proceeds to give us a table with incomplete sentences that we get to fill with the word that resonates with us , from a list that resonated with her . In verses broken by columns and line breaks, Hala captures splintered memories of displacement from homeland, family, and body. There is rage—“I don’t have time to write about the soul. There are bodies to count”—as the poems contend with what it means to be Palestinian, what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a daughter—sometimes, all at once. “When my mother bought a patch of land & tried to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me because my name is my father’s name because he was born in Palestine and so impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t have me you know the way our mothers did” Hala has published four award-winning poetry collections (including The Twenty-Ninth Year ) and received accolades for her novels, Salt Houses, and The Arsonists’ City . Hala tells me her writing practice is instinct-based. It is evident from the way she expertly finds her way within frameworks, both given and self-imposed. We talked about finding liberation in the constraints of structures, steadfastness in the face of erasure, the parallel between houses, […]
Click here to view original page at For Hala Alyan, Art Is Not A Replacement for Policy Change
© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
The Mallorcan Joana Marcús is a young bestseller in Spain and America, writer of young adult novels with a romantic
