Tuesday, August 6, 2024

The Sealey Challenge, Day 6: The Moon that Turns You Back by Hala Alyan

 I enjoyed some of the more inventive forms in this book by Alyan, including something she calls "interactive fiction" which provides multiple-column poems that share an opening, and sometimes a closing, line. There are poems that play with coding. There is also a very moving series of erasure pieces that use medical records as the original material. The piece that struck home the most for me was "[Political] Dialogue" which describes dementia not unlike what I'm seeing in mother-in-law: "There were / two worlds then, the one we lived in and the / one she invented...."

A beautifully written book, with plenty of heartache as well as love.       



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