PositiveThe Adroit JournalAlyan’s Twenty-Ninth Year responds from a set of spectacles and subjectivities that manage to be both highly pathologized yet underwritten: the exile, the daughter of immigrants, the addict, the Arab, the wife. Alyan approaches these origin wounds and distorted projections through lyric remnants, and in decorating a backdrop of mutilation with souvenirs of quiet grief and unkempt eroticism, Alyan manages to scrape back some of what has been violently taken ... While Alyan risks writing the nostalgia of rebellious girlhood to be nearly too romantic, paired with the realities of constant surveillance and the humiliation of being policed wherever she goes, Alyan’s stringent confessions of deceit, alcoholism, and theft can be read more incisively as micro-refusals, a diary of refusal ... , Alyan’s poetic layering heightens the blurred and often exaggerated distinctions of sex and work, desire and obligation ... but Alyan’s poems offer some relief, a green door cracking open.
