Babeldom

At the intersection of narrative and noise, the poems in Babeldom emerge to explore and translate the unheard and strange babel that surrounds our different worlds. These poems grasp at the hurried and ephemeral conversations within and outside of us that stretch from the quiet hours we spend alone to the anonymous faces that we pass on our daily commutes. Babeldom is the exploration of all of this, this kingdom of babel, that we all wake and sleep in, in which the muffled noise you hear from across the street might be the prayer or indignation or defeat of another protagonist in different story.

“These poems by Talal Alyan are suffused with incandescence, secrets hidden in dream and unearthed in waking life, answers to ‘a prayer you haven’t yet made.’ They are a body spread across continents, deep in their longings, generous in their inclusions. An astonishing and prodigious first collection.”
—D. A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or A guide for Boys: Poems and Repast: Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails

“Talal Alyan’s Babeldom is full of ears and prayers, commands and desires. It explores the way we try desperately to hang onto ourselves and each other in an overwhelming world and imagines the landscape we’ll leave after we’re gone. Even that landscape, though—human-less, apocalyptic, possibly radiated—contains the echoes of the voices we have whispered countless times into the dark, and is better for them.”—Elizabeth Cantwell author of All the Emergency-Type Structures