What do you think?
Rate this book
Four Cities
Wandering from Detroit to Haifa, Tripoli to Brooklyn, the poems of FOUR CITIES reveal the underbelly of cities, bearing witness to narratives of love, occupation and faith. These testimonies are harvested from displaced landscapes, histories and languages, revealing the unsettled lives of immigrants. Using urgent, haunting language, Alyan evokes the unlikely backdrop of Palestinian bazaars and Midwestern junkyards, policed checkpoints and boisterous nightclubs. A Lebanese village burns while lovers kiss in Paris. A traveler unpacks her grief in the homes of strangers. This lyrical collection captures the interplay between adopted and imposed homes, the poignant legacy of exile.
102 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2015
About the author
Hala Alyan
19 books1,171 followersHala Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA from Columbia University. While completing her doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University, she specialized in trauma and addiction work with various populations.
Her memoir, I'll Tell You When I'm Home is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in June 2025.
She has published two novels, her debut Salt Houses (2017), is the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, and her second novel, The Arsonists' City (2021).
Alyan's poetry collections include Atrium (2012), winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry; Four Cities (2015); Hijra (2016), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; The Twenty-Ninth Year (2019); and The Moon That Turns You Back (2024).
She co-edited the poetry anthology We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (2023) with poet Zeina Hashem Beck.
Alyan has also been awarded a Lannan Foundation fellowship and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and literary magazines including The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Guernica, Jewish Currents,The New York Times Book Review, Prairie Schooner and Colorado Review.
Alyan is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU. She resides in Brooklyn with her family.
Her memoir, I'll Tell You When I'm Home is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in June 2025.
She has published two novels, her debut Salt Houses (2017), is the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, and her second novel, The Arsonists' City (2021).
Alyan's poetry collections include Atrium (2012), winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry; Four Cities (2015); Hijra (2016), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; The Twenty-Ninth Year (2019); and The Moon That Turns You Back (2024).
She co-edited the poetry anthology We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (2023) with poet Zeina Hashem Beck.
Alyan has also been awarded a Lannan Foundation fellowship and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and literary magazines including The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Guernica, Jewish Currents,The New York Times Book Review, Prairie Schooner and Colorado Review.
Alyan is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU. She resides in Brooklyn with her family.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 29, 2024
Reflective and shimmering - poems that embrace time and place beautifully in a fleeting constant world of sadness and acceptance. There are certain works of poetry that you find are very relatable, you are taken back to a time and place that you have forgotten. The poems in this book are such poems; hauntingly so.
July 21, 2018
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.”
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.”
February 9, 2016
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.
March 7, 2024
Earlier this year, I went back and read 'Hijra' by Hala Alyan, one of my favorite collections of poetry. I then went back to read one of her earlier works, 'Four Cities'. Feeling like a fever dream travelogue, packed with empathy and confessionals, wanderlust and coming-of-age angst, this one is a ball of energy inside of a stamped passport. She does such a good job going global while also keeping it internal and personal. She has a new collection coming out in a couple of days, The Moon That Turns You Back, and I'll most assuredly be reading it this time next week.
February 9, 2023
A collection of yearning, of love, of prayer for the cities both whole and war-torn and the people within them.
May 21, 2022
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.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews