Four Cities by Hala Alyan

Four Cities Reviews

• 
  Jon Nakapalau

  Reflective and shimmering - poems that embrace time and place beautifully in a fleeting constant world of sadness and acceptance.
• 
  Nathaniel

  I read poetry mostly for two reasons: mining for memorable nuggets of language and soaking in what is hopefully a mature and substantive alternate world.
  
  I turn away from poetry for two reasons: shallow, referential posturing and unexceptional use of language.
  
  Hala gave me no reason to turn away—there was something in nearly every poem to linger with, to underline or remember.
  
  The world she conjures is consistent, layered, memorable, caring and, at times, important--in the sense of presencing grief and wrongdoing on the world stage in a way that makes it possible to resonate with, that makes it pertain to the reader, however geographically or ideologically distant she might be.
  
  The style and swagger of the narrative voice is tempered by the vibe of an old soul and the references tend classical over contemporary, which is smart.
  
  Sections like the below are why I’ll be reading more of her poetry:
  
  “The sea eats the sea like firewood. / Coveting cheapens and, alone we are stone sharks / gurgling water in a fountain.” --Anne
  
  “I have earned it: the only edifice I own / and what astonishing / gratitude / to know that beneath and below and / beyond-- / think of sand covered briefly, / shockingly, / by snow-- / there is something cluttered and beautiful” – Of the MRI Images for My Abdomen
  
  I love the way grandmothers and the multi-generational feminine appears throughout Hala’s work.
  
  “Would you rather be his muse / or his wife? She asks. / Rain again, clouds blanching. / A single white hair, / glossy – my grandmothers’s / cat – clings to my / sweater. I flick at it. Muse, / but I am lying.” -- One Conversation in May
  
  There’s also an occasional bohemian whiff of beat-era electricity.
  
  “In ghosthood we sparkplug car radios, /startle the living with static / and bluegrass music. With banshee hair / I found you testing the microphone, / roping cable wires as rain glazed / the Village into an ornament. / God lives in the marshland.”
  
  
• 
  Liz Worth

  Hala Alyan is a writer to watch. 'Four Cities' hit me hard. I can't even do it justice with a review here because the command that this woman has over language is just...wow. It's the kind of book that gets right into you. Read it, read it, read it. And then read it again.
• 
  Amanda Karch

  A collection of yearning, of love, of prayer for the cities both whole and war-torn and the people within them.
• 
  Carey

  This is a collection that I think just didn't really work for me. There seemed to be no guiding theme to this collection and the placement of some poems felt odd. I didn't think that the poems themselves were bad; I actually enjoyed a number of them! However, I think they just didn't always work well together in such a collection.