Domestic Empire: Poems

Pulitzer Prize finalist Hala Alyan’s sixth collection of poetry, on power and reclamation within American, familial, and geopolitical structures.

In The Domestic Empire, award-winning Palestinian poet, novelist, and memoirist Hala Alyan traces the contours of daily life, memory, and motherhood against the backdrop of divorce and ongoing genocide. Alyan masterfully bends poetic form, collapsing traditional boundaries: prose poems morph into clinical case notes and dating profiles, then weave seamlessly between traditional ghazals, all culminating in two astonishing sonnet crowns. With searing honesty, grace, and humor, Alyan refuses silence by holding to light the truths of a marriage, of a country, of a home. Written with precision, rage, and above all, love, these are Hala Alyan’s finest poems yet.