PositiveHyperallergic\"The poems in The Twenty Ninth Year are like so many sorrowful songs, broken up like exquisite corpses, surrealist postcards from a nomad’s wanderings, dark confessions of a battered soul ... [Alyan\'s] voyage takes place on a more intimate, subversive level. Her provocative affront to the taboos imposed upon Arab and Muslim women, her shattering of the shame that surrounds our sexualities and bodies, her frank display of abuse, obscenity and failure, liberates the genre from its grandiosity, imagining a gospel of the mundane that reflects the mortality and fragility in each and every one of us ... And, through the fractured sentences and illogical juxtapositions, the strange scenarios and mad imagination, a nightmare emerges.\
