The Hungering Years
Format:Paperback
Publisher:The 87 Press
Publishing:16th Feb '27
£16.99
This title is due to be published on 16th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Critically acclaimed debut from Palestinian poet, as witty as it is tender.
Palestinian poet Summer Farah’s magnetic debut explores themes of diasporic belonging, resilience, and popular culture, imagined through conversations with Arab-American literary pioneer Etel Adnan.
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.
...one of the most important rising poets alive today. —George Abraham, Mizna
In a collection so deeply entrenched in the question of language as a question of being, it makes sense that, like the waves, Farah’s words take their time to crash upon us over and over and over again. —Sanna Wani, The Poetry Project
Throughout this breathtaking debut, Farah hungers voraciously for belonging, for recognition, for hunger itself, as well as for things that are far more tangible and dire—Palestinian liberation, an end to genocide and colonialism, a way to live amidst the heartbreak and violence of the world. —Ally Ang, The Rumpus
In The Hungering Years, Farah uses a poem to think about what is inside of a lifetime... If the world is ending, these poems sing, let us go down dancing. —Jody Chan, Apogee Journal
This collection traces many types of hunger—for connection; for freedom from pain; for sustenance, physical and emotional; for art in all forms, ranging from the works of Etel Adnan to the CW’s Supernatural. At its core this book is a gorgeous mosaic of all the creations and destructions that feed Farah’s poetry. —Samia Saliba, Mizna
Like a View-Master toy, the physical act of turning each page of The Hungering Years brings on a new cast of characters and new setting, all filtered through the same light of Farah’s symphonic and insurgent poetic voice. —Em Dial, The Grind
“I wonder about the life stolen from me. Would I love what I love if I loved it from Palestine?” For Farah, to remember before is to remember the land itself, time and space wed in alive, exquisite poems. —Poetry Northwest
This is one of the most electric and alive and excited books of poetry I’ve read all year. —Lazy & Entitled
- Short-listed for Golden Poppy Book Awards 2026
ISBN: 9781067693947
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown