Four Cities

“ Following her mesmerizing debut collection Atrium, Hala Alyan offers a sustaining and luminous meditation on love and war in Four Cities. Baghdad, New York, Beirut, Tel Aviv, Tripoli, Detroit and Paris are just names on maps, 'for when maps fold and countries vanish… it is just you and the dust you carry on your skin.' These gritty, volatile communities dissolve into dreamscapes, redolent with lemons, dazzled with snow, awake to conversation and kisses. The sky is always open for possibilities: fireworks, moonlight, the call to prayer, dandelions parachuting through the air. What a splendid majestic if troubled world we find ourselves in love in.”
— D.A. Powell, author of Chronic and Cocktails

Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American poet and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals including The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Colorado Review. Her first full-length poetry collection, Atrium (Three Rooms Press), was awarded the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry. Her collection Hijra was selected as a winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and will be published by Southern Illinois University Press. She resides in Manhattan.