Book Description
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 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.”
 
About the Author
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.