The Hungering Years by Summer Farah

Utterly magnetic, Summer Farah’s debut poetry collection The Hungering Years is a rush of breathless song, voicing confessions so often left unsung amidst personal and collective crisis. “I am afraid of asking the right questions,” Farah admits. But through intimate conversations with fellow Arab-American writer and literary ancestor Etel Adnan, this work finds the courage to ask: What is art? An escape? A reflection? Another unhealthy attachment? Though the answers are elusive, what steps into the light is a collective of friends whose genuine care and companionship anchor these poems through their spiraling search. 

“I am always looking for Palestine, and yes, I am always looking for love,” these poems croon, holding so much of the world even as they trace an inheritance of displacement. The Hungering Years conjures startling landscapes where we may also experience what it is to be consumed by obsession, echoing with songs by Mitski, iconic scenes from Supernatural, and the sound of the Mediterranean Sea. But as Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes in her introduction, Farah’s repetitions “are more than echo. They are a vernacular of this unspeakable era,” anchored in “questions that keep us reaching toward life,” and questions toward each other.

Building glass structures from her questions, Farah pushes their architecture almost to breaking. Then breaking, the spirit—luminous, actualized—reveals itself through the cracks. Through the landscapes of California, Palestine, and all of the distances in between, there emerges a new sense of devotion to what is possible which might thrust us, together, “off the edge, / in love, towards God.”

With an introduction by poet, essayist, and translator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.

The Hungering Years officially launches & ships on February 24th! 
The first 100 pre-orders will receive limited-edition ephemera.

Summer Farah’s debut collection The Hungering Years bubbles with language, is desirous, sensitive, and hysterically (ferociously) human. “I” is I, is mother, is the guiding wisdom of Etel Adnan, is Palestine, is the work that writes Palestine into the future, is the epistolary thread of love that holds this daring young poet’s work together. “i am an enemy of dust i am an amalgamation of everyone i have ever loved …” writes Farah, enlisting us in this vital poetry against the death cult, lush with solidarity, teeming with the futurity we need.

— Wendy Xu, author of The Past

What I most adore about Summer Farah's work, and what most comes alive in The Hungering Years is that there is no such thing as an unworthy affection, nothing unworthy of close and careful attention, nothing unworthy of being pressed up against the undeserving world and becoming something greater. This is a gift and a delight, and through that gift, these poems are richly and generously populated, and teeming with beauty.

— Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year

Summer Farah's words ease me, compel me, motivate me. Her work is agile and brilliant, her mind potent and illustrious—like air, a song, rhythmic and concise. These poems move me to my core, rupturing something deep inside of me about place, Palestine and Etel Adnan. "I memorize no language/but their voices," she writes as I memorize her words again and again, uttering gratitude that I get to be alive and read Summer's words. This book is both a spell and an oracle.

— Fariha Róisín, author of Survival Takes a Wild Imagination

The Hungering Years cites every source and every source of light. Every text and texture is worthy, and in fact essential. It's a mixtape, it's a collage, it's a refusal of prestige in exchange for obsession and all the doors that swing open when you give into it. Fallen angels and molding figs. A church in Palestine. Astrology and salted bread. The bright blue cactus flower. Every cosmic and rational thing is catalogued, contained, then exhumed and made new within the biome of these poems written from inside of these hungering years where we forage, we consider, we collage. We we we, because Farah is generous enough to implicate us. This book a mycelium network of memories that aren't static, unless it's the static you reach your hands through before falling into the tv screen. Everything is connected, everything is romantic, everything is cinema. This collection changes what / how I consider. It is unafraid of hysteria. It is fertile with a dry humor because this is the poetics of apocalypse. I want these poems with me at the end of the world which is made of more worlds, and all of these worlds dying, all of them springing up again always moving always shifting, always crawling over each other, like empire becoming ant farm before becoming something better (Inshallah) -- this and more is what I believe is possible when emerging from The Hungering Years.

— Jess Rizkallah, author of the magic my body becomes

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.

✦ Select Online Publications ✦

✦ Poem-A-Day, “AFTER MOUNT TAMALPAIS, I TELL ETEL ADNAN ABOUT SUPERNATURAL”

✦ The Seventh Wave, “the angels are falling”

✦ Split This Rock, “IN ANOTHER LIFE LINK IS A POET”

✦ Kenyon Review, “A YEAR AFTER I LOVED HAIKYUU,” ; “I TELL ETEL ADNAN ABOUT MITSKI” ; “I TELL ETEL ADNAN ABOUT THE LEGEND OF ZELDA”

✦ Apogee Journal, “AFTER WE WATCH ROAD FOOD I CONSIDER PLACE”

✦ Poetry Online, “portrait of each moon that has seen link live”

✦ LitHub, I FORGOT, LIKE YOU, TO DIE: 12 PALESTINIAN WRITERS RESPOND TO THE ONGOING NAKBA, “it will be pink”

100 pages
ISBN 979-8-9905483-4-3
LCCN 2025945291
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