Hungering Years

The poems in Summer Farah’s magnetic debut collection The Hungering Years move between personal and collective crises. A series of epistolary poems imagine conversations with Arab-American literary ancestor Etel Adnan, focused through engagements with popular culture, from the musician Mitski, the television series Supernatural, the video game The Legend of Zelda, and more.Farah’s poetry is imbued with a sense of grief – its entanglement with migration, yearning, and return – as the reader follows the speaker from Berkeley, California to the Mediterranean Sea and onwards to Palestine. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes in her introduction to this collection, Farah’s repetitions “are more than echo. They are a vernacular of this unspeakable era”. What emerges in the sonic architecture of Farah’s poetry is a sense of devotion to the possible, to friendship and the search for existential meaning through art.