Hijra by Hala Alyan
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the function of food in contemporary poetry by Palestinian American women. What was being communicated through the act of eating? There’s a line in Hala’s poem “Seham” that set me off on my journey: “Taste June in the steam.” Here, food granted access to an intergenerational history. What happens then, when you sever that entry point through restriction, starvation? Much of The Hungering Years considers distances—friends, family, life or death, empty or full. There is also the distance created between the self and the body through restriction, the distance between the spirit and culture. Hijra affirms the necessity of a closeness between, an argument in favor of being fed.
Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella by Charlie Markbreiter
Charlie’s hybrid work is what I want to be when I grow up. The play between different modes of fiction and theory—and it is play—is unlike anything else I’d ever read. Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella was one of the puzzle pieces I needed to indulgent in certain topics that made The Hungering Years possible. No shame! No embarrassment! Let’s talk about queer theory and how Nate from Gossip Girl is trans. Let’s imagine different scenarios both for the show and an imaginary metacontext around it. Everything is everything, and this book let me feel confident in that assertion. I know everything I write next will be marked by Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella, and I know The Hungering Years would not be the same without it.
Journey to Mount Tamalpais, Etel Adnan
The Hungering Years takes inspiration and guidance from many of Etel’s works, but again, the ways this book came together and worked would not exist without spending time with Journey to Mount Tamalpais when I did. The summer of 2023, unemployed and estranged from so many other grounding things led me into the arms of my most rabid obsession—Supernatural. I’d always been obsessive, weird, attached, but Journey to Mount Tam helped me put language to this attachment, to understand obsession as an artistic process and question. After I actually went to the mountain in the fall of 2024, I revisited this book in January of 2025 with new eyes. And with that experience, I was able to write my favorite poem in the book—and the last added—I Tell Etel Adnan About Supernatural (unofficially called “redux”).
A Fortune For Your Disaster, Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif’s work is incredibly influential on me, both poetry and essay and how to move in community. The prose poem, the long titles—this is how you identify a self-studied student of Hanif. But it is the structure of this book that appealed to me most—the multitudes of series, the way they are scattered throughout the book and don’t carry an obvious chronology. I really liked the returning to a container and letting these various containers speak to one another in creating a momentum for the book. I didn’t watch The Prestige until fairly recently, but when I did and finally understood the book itself was not just referencing the film but taking its structure from the parts of a trick laid out, I was even more energized—what if my book took its cues from the first, second, third aspects of something else? I began making lists and lists of beginnings, middles, and ends, seeking an arc for my collection that lived elsewere. Ultimately, the arc was organic rater than borrowed, but this study helped me understand what it was I wanted to do. Also, it was kind of funny to re-read this book and go wow….maybe I subconsciously took the Etel poem ideas from the ghost of Marvin Gaye series…..<3
You Are Not Dead, Wendy Xu
In 2021, I was down two long-term friendships and a romantic relationship, dealing with a landlord who wanted me dead. I felt lonely and strange and overwhelmed. A dear friend dropped off a stack of books for an attempt at a Sealey challenge. I absolutely did not complete the challenge as I was too busy crying or staring off into space or meeting with the Berkeley renters board, but come September I still had the stack. I began a nightly ritual of reading two collections back-to-back. One of my favorite nights was Paige Lewis’s Space Struck and Wendy Xu’s You Are Not Dead. I liked the weirdgirlisms of both books, the imagining of space in both collections being slightly altered, a reach to meet the place where their images landed. Wendy’s book, though, stuck with me the most. The repetition of the final series We Are Both Sure to Die stayed with me; I would repeat “We are both sure to die / but I feel like a person again” as a prayer, prophecy, willing that feeling to return to me. I liked the way the book felt like a conversation, so many poems gesturing to a “you”; there was some coldness, some strangeness, but always intimacy despite that distance. It felt in-line with my emotional state at the time, and apt for the fragility I felt in my other relationships because of the dissolution of so many others back-to-back. So often when I wrote poems it felt like I was responding to the Xu lines in my head—not necessarily their poetic form, rather the conversation she was building in the pages. On walks, my heart was a repetition of Solmaz Sharif’s a life is a thing you have to start, Mary Oliver’s what is it you plan to do, and Wendy’s I feel like a person again. Other lines permeate, of course—“you are a part of other people but not like them” whenever I feel just so, so strange in a crowd; “the ocean says you are not dead, what else do you want it to announce?” whenever I reset in my body but still feel restless. Restlessness, strangeness, and a conversation: these are the key parts of The Hungering Years, the navigation of such, the searching for someone to talk to. I’ve re-read You Are Not Dead more than any other poetry collection, I think. Making a book is writing, but it is so many other things too—You Are Not Dead supplies the everything else in that process.
the magic my body becomes, Jess Rizkallah
When I write “I have loved so many prophetic women,” Jess is the first that comes to mind. She is the beginning—from seeing her on Button Poetry to her debut being the first poetry collection I anticiapted, I am lucky to call her one of my very dearest friends. From Jess, I learn magic—her work finds the most glorious way to understand an image, flecked with whimsy and humor and heart. Her speakers are often wondering, imagining, bringing the world closer to her in those musings. As the first winner of the Etel Adnan prize, too, Jess was my introduction to not only Etel’s work, but a community of Arab American writers writing after what her legacy enabled. I cannot think of Jess’s writing without considering her service and kindness to all of us weird girl Arab writers who wanted to be just like her. I am so lucky for this model, this friendship, this light.
Who is Wellness For?, Fariha Róisín
My writing about the body, illness, and my relationship to getting well was so informed by this essay collection. Fariha was one of the first writers I loved. Femsplain was an online magazine that took me to so many other places, introducing me to a coterie of women and queer people of color working in the personal essay form. I didn’t realize that you could simply write about yourself, your experiences, and have people want to hear more. I spent many years anticipating an essay collection from Fariha, and when it finally came! Oh I devoured it. It changed me. I’d long had a base understanding of the relationship between wellness, colonization, and the medical-industrial-complex, but the ultimate vulnerability with which they explore it in this collection made so many of my own alienating experiences click. I often say that I could die to day and live again began while I was ill—bed-bound, asthma attack, unable to go or do anything except play Zelda. The Hungering Years processes many states of unwellness, but ones that are often mysteries—in the years since I wrote I Tell Etel Adnan about my Pussy Problems, I’ve had only more and more strange little test results. Poetry is a medium of mystery—how apt it is to utilize to write of my various bodily mysteries, empowered by Who is Wellness For?.
Water & Salt, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
I took an online class with Lena in 2017 or 2018 about Arab women poets. The one I resonated with most was Fadwa Tuqan, her beautiful images of Palestinian life and the undercurrents of resistance in her work introduced me to a lineage I had not yet known how to access. In our class, I asked Lena about authority, and how much I might have when it comes to language—Arabic, of Palestine, to write at all. She encouraged me that I had just as much right as anyone to write about what was true and close to me. I don’t really know if I believed her, yet, but in 2024 I revisited all her collections to write a profile off the tails of her National Book Award longlisting (and eventual win, our queen!). In that visitation, I realized how much her teachings had solidified in me—if not in that class and that moment, but in my reading of her work. Lena’s poetry is so intimate—differently so than the conversations of Wendy Xu or the vulnerabilities of Who is Wellness For? but instead there is a particular type of access granted in the poems. Walter & Salt writes so much of procedure; “Running Orders,” a poem that goes viral whenever crisis strikes in Gaza, brings the reader into the devastating chaos that befalls Palestinians—it identifies a situation, rather than explains it. Reminds the reader of the aftermaths to come, as if we’ve all been through it before. My favorite poem, “Eating the Earth,” too, is a poem of process, though entirely different. It is about making bread. And in that making bread we are engulfed in an abundance of lush descriptions, transporting the act into something holy. This transportation is what I seek throughout The Hungering Years, as this transportation is what I feel is true—the desire for magic in the mundane, the desire to pinpoint the significance of each act. I remember reading “Eating the Earth” for the first time and feeling sick because of how much I was denying myself, and how much I knew I wanted to experience what the poem was offering. This sickness, too, is in The Hungering Years. Water & Salt offers a careful balance between an indulgence in language and a wariness of its violence; these are lessons Lena taught me, both through the poems and how she’s led a writerly life since.
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✦ Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer, editor, and zine-maker from California. Her chapbook I could die today and live again (Game Over Books) was featured in Electric Lit’s “Favorite Poetry Collections of 2024”. In 2023, Summer served as columnist at Palette Poetry, writing POETRY DOUBLE FEATURES, putting two poetry collections in conversation each month. She has edited folios for a variety of magazines and journals, including: FIYAH Lit for the Palestine Solidarity issue, ORIGINALITYISDEAD for Violet, Indigo, Blue, Etc., A Soft Reset, a CNF folio of video game writing for ANMLY, and others. With Lip Manegio, she curated a zine of art and writing inspired by the CW, NOTHING HERE IS CORRECT AND IT IS DELICIOUS. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets, the Pushcart Prize, a Hugo Award, and is anthologized in Heaven Looks Like Us, edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi. Her essay From Witness From Speech From Image: On Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee was an honorable mention for the 2025 Krause Essay Prize. She has received support from Sundress Academy for the Arts through the Microgrant for Palestinian Writers, attended the Winter ‘22 Tin House Workshop, was a 22-23 NBCC Emerging Critic Fellow, and is a Poetry Northwest Critic at Large. Summer is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and the National Book Critics Circle. The Hungering Years is her debut poetry collection. She is calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.