In Summer Farah’s The Hungering Years, things as disparate as Etel Adnan, The Little Mermaid, and Supernatural, among others, come together in Farah’s lyrical, meditative articulations of place, diasporic longing, and lineage, both literary and familial. In these poems that are formally inventive and abundant in image and language, Farah’s speaker comes to new recognitions of self in relation to place, using pop culture as a mirror through which to read oneself anew.
In this interview, we discuss Etel Adnan, pop culture, place, and lineage.
Vika Mujumdar (VM): The Hungering Years is so deeply in conversation with Etel Adnan’s work; could you talk a bit about your relationship to her and how that’s come to be over time, and how her influence has how her influence on your poetry has shifted or changed over time?
Summer Farah (SF): Where to start? Adnan is such a significant figure in Arab American literary traditions. Even before I was engaging with her work, the trajectory and growth of my presence in literary communities was so indebted to her, whether it was from the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), which was a literary home and community that I found very early in my burgeoning writing life—my first writing community is slam and spoken word, and as I transitioned out of that, and wanted a broader understanding of where poetry could live. RAWI was the place where I started learning about that. Adnan was one of the founding members of RAWI. She and a lot of other incredible women started that organization. I ended up being on the board of RAWI for several years. A lot of my writing sort of came into itself alongside service for my community, and so those things are very intertwined. One of the other writers I am indebted to is Jess Rizkallah. She started as someone who I very much aspired to, and now is one of my dearest friends, and I’m very lucky for that. And her book, The Magic My Body Becomes, was the inaugural winner of the Etel Adnan Prize, previously published by the University of Arkansas Press, and now at Noemi. The naming of the prize after Etel Adnan creates a specific orientation of the work that comes under it. It has been a lot of women writers, almost exclusively, and there is something very mystical and searching and forceful behind a lot of the books in that series. I have a lot of gratitude there in just thinking about her influence, and the way that the first book of that book prize brought me one of the greatest friendships of my life.
The first book I read by her was Surge, which came out from Nightboat. I had read scattered poems and excerpts before that, but I hadn’t really sat and spent time with her work in that sort of holistic way. I found Surge very difficult to connect with and follow and in some ways that was disheartening, but I kept trying. Every time I went to a bookstore, I would look for her name. She was such a symbol and such an overarching figure; I wanted my relationship to the physical text to also be organic. I started accumulating mostly her books that Nightboat was publishing. And then I snagged a used copy of Arab Apocalypse. I kept trying to find a point in and to connect. And it wasn’t until I read In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country that her work clicked for me. There was such a specific feeling in that book of distance and guilt and the oscillation of being somewhere and feeling alienated in that place, and the knowledge that that place is wreaking havoc on your home. I feel so distraught at the ordinariness that I am experiencing. The way that she wrote about her childhood in Lebanon, the way she wrote about obsession and kind of being a weird girl, I got it. I could return to the more airy philosophical texts now that I had this stronger understanding of where she was coming from. I finished that book, and then the next day she died. I was reading it in Berkeley, and I remember sitting there and thinking that it was so awesome that I was alive at the same time as this person, and I was sitting in a city where she lived and she thought and she learned and made art. Even if she was a world away; she was in France, when she passed. I’m glad I kept trying. And then she passed, and it was such an interesting grief that I had finally sort of understood, at least had found a pathway to understanding this person and I probably would never get to speak with her. I wouldn’t get to speak with her unless I did a seance. From then on, I decided I would just keep reading her. I feel like I learn more about her every year.
The poems to her began kind of as a joke; I was reading Shifting the Silence, and there was a line about aliens. And I took a picture of it, and I sent it to my friend, the poet Samia Saliba, who was working on a series of poems about The X-Files. And I said: “Do you think Adnan watched The X-Files?” I ended up using an excerpt from Sea and Fog as an epigraph for my Zelda chapbook, because as I was reading that book, I was thinking so much about the wonder and the strangeness and the eeriness and the way of imagining the life of landscapes, and the attachment to their mystery and the intimacy in their mystery, and how that really felt so resonant with what I like about Zelda games. It worked really well in the context of that book, and I started thinking she would have loved The Legend of Zelda. It was just this little joke in my head, that it sucks that she’s dead, I want to tell her about video games. And eventually, I thought, what if I did a series of poems about that?
Then, when I read Journey to Mount Tamalpais—I’d read excerpts before—but when I finally read it in its entirety, I was in the Bay Area again, and I was deep into a backslide obsession with Supernatural, the TV show. The way that she writes about the mountain, and the way that she writes about the artists that she loves and how they are beside her, that all factors into her obsession. It felt like how I feel about Supernatural. A lot of my relationship to her was figuring myself out first from this sort of legacy perspective of what she built in this country, a literary community, what she contributed. And then it turned into pushing myself into reading and focusing and studying and sort of—how to understand a body of work that doesn’t hit right away? Into realizing all of the ways in which we were similar, and especially outside of the easy ways we were similar. It was this relationship to art that really made me feel settled and excited and connected, and I realized so much of my work was already thinking about that. Reading her helped me process that, and it made me wish again that I had gotten to a place of understanding with her sooner, but I’m also content in that I have this parasocial, intimate relationship with her work outside of her as a figure.
VM: This collection is very rooted in pop culture—music, TV—what were some early poems you wrote in the collection, and how did that focus deepen over the course of the collection?
SF: The earliest pop culture poem is from 2019: “In The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea (2000) Melody Undoes The Little Mermaid (1989).” I wrote that at a writing workshop through RAWI. It was a week in Los Angeles, one of the best weeks of my life, in a workshop with Marwa Helal. She was teaching us about zuihitsus, and somehow, I arrived at that poem. When I was sharing it in workshop, George Abraham said it was the most Summer thing they could imagine. Marwa asked what they meant, and George explained that the blending of contemporary pop culture, Mitski, a Disney movie, and Palestine, was very, very Summer. I really enjoy the mishmash of many different things. The Little Mermaid poem was the first of these attempts at putting different things in conversation within the space of a poem asking how these things were like each other, beyond my attachment, which is the orienting guide for a lot the book.
“Listening to Olivia Rodrigo on a plane to San Diego” was originally published under a different title, but in the book, I reverted it to its draft title. I was listening to Olivia Rodrigo on a plane, and I was feeling crazy. When I had submitted that poem for publication, I was a little embarrassed by its origin, and I had only talked about it in a jokey way. But I realized, in the shape of the book, I wanted to foreground the things I was embarrassed by. I had the collection as a draft on my Google Drive before the Etel Adnan poems came into existence. But once I started writing them, I wrote five of them in one night. The Carly Rae Jepsen one was the first one of the of the series that really came out. All of the things that that I am are tethered by my history of obsessions, and I have always filtered myself through these things. The way to tie these poems together, however disparate they may be, is to lean in to that reality.
VM: I’m struck by the way lineage functions in these poems; there’s of course the poetic lineage of Etel Adnan, the familial legacies of being Palestinian—in the last poem, where you write: “I wonder about the life stolen from me. Would I love what I love if I loved it from Palestine?” How do you understand how lineage functions in these poems? How does that tie in for you to how time and both the present and history function in your work?
SF: I read a lot. These days, I mostly read poetry, but I still do lots of nonfiction collections each year. I am most energized to write are after I spend time with a really good book and after I spend time outside. Because of that, my influences are plain to see. I don’t know if people can see them as easily as I can see them, but there’s this interesting phenomenon in which I have the writers that I know who live inside my work, and sometimes I will happen on a writer who, sort of retroactively, I realize I am in lineage with. There’s a Naomi Shihab Nye poem, “Different Ways to Pray,” and the first time I encountered this poem I had just spent a lot of time writing my own poem about prayer and the different navigations of what prayer means to me as a Palestinian, as a Christian Palestinian, as someone who has this investment in food, culturally and sort of trying to find my way out of an eating disorder. When I read it, it was very early in my exploration of Palestinian American artists broadly. And I felt so amazed that we had these similar images within us, and not just the image themselves, but the execution and the context and the sentiment. I realized I was part of this lineage. There is a back and forth in which there are writers who you read, and you are inspired by, and your writing sort of takes on their cadences. Some of the poems in this book, they’re Hanif [Abdurraqib] pastiches. But then there are other times where you happen on something that you are sort of descended from, and there are the reverberations of that. I learned that Etel Adnan made zines, and the zines that she made, she would write out her friends’ poems and then paint over them. And I had been making my own zines that were poem zines for the past year, and it was another way in which we are aligned. It’s so cosmic. There are the ways in which lineage is a deliberate thing, in which you want to be part of a specific literary legacy, or style or school of writing, and then there are the cosmic ways in which you just so happen to find yourself within a space.
VM: I’m curious also about how place functions in these poems, both as space and as mythical. In one poem, you write “I pretend California is substitute enough.” In a later “The Angels are Falling,” you write: “In the desert garden, we know / everything leads back to empire.” Of course, most central is perhaps the last poem of the collection, “After We Watch Roadfood, I Consider Place.” Here, you open with the line: “Etel, you write about wanting a place: Berkeley / Damascus / Delphi / Beirut. I / understand the cling to the ancestral, as if my latent spirituality means there is / something waiting for me in Nazareth.” How do you see the role place plays in your work?
SF: I really like leaving a poetry collection and feeling a groundedness to the poems, like they are being spoken from a specific spot or point in time and delivered. I struggle with work that feels a little too as if it is in the air and ephemeral. For me, it’s important to think about my narrators existing in space and so, often that is tied to literal cities or rooms in which events of the poem or the spirit of the poem occur. I am someone who has had a lot of long-distance friendships in my life. A lot of the people I love I met through online fandom spaces, and so they are very far from me, whether it is in Chicago or Colombia. This desire to be in another place, too, shapes a lot of the book. And that’s not even thinking about diasporic longing to be in a different place. A lot of my family is in Palestine and other parts of the world. And since my longing, which is the lead feeling in this collection, is dictated by elsewhere, I think that the poems couldn’t happen without both understanding where the speaker may be and where the speaker might want to be otherwise.
VM: What are some of the places you wrote these poems in? How did they change or shift in those landscapes?
SF: I wrote a lot of them in bed, a lot of them on the side of the road. Where my parents live in North County San Diego, they live on a hill, and it doesn’t have a sidewalk. If you want to go on a walk, you walk in a parking lane. It’s not the best place to open your phone and go to the Notes app, but I did do that a lot. I wrote some on planes, some in the formal space of a writing workshop. But less so the physical space in which I wrote them changed, and more so the temporal space. I think the poem that changed the most from the first draft to how it is in the book is “After We Watch Roadfood I Consider Place.” I really wanted to write about watching this show with my buddy, and I tried a few times. It kept growing, but it just didn’t feel like there was enough there. I wrote this in late summer of 2023, and then post October 7. Roadfood is a PBS travel series hosted by Misha Collins, who’s one of the Supernatural leads. And we did watch it because we wanted to see what else Misha was up to. It’s goofy. I love food travel shows. I like chatting with people and learning about things. I also like getting annoyed; I enjoy the irritation that I get from certain things in the realm of food travel series, and so it’s awesome to watch something like that, led by a guy who has kind of psychologically tormented you as a teenager. We had a blast watching it. I just wanted to capture how fun it was and how strange it was to be sitting with a friend who I’d been friends with since I was sixteen, but had never met in person before until that moment, over ten years later, and we decided, in our limited time together, to watch the show.
The thing about Misha Collins is that he very much likes to position himself as a good liberal guy. He’s politically vocal, involved in things. He has a charity. And when you’re fifteen, that’s really cool. But he had never said anything about Palestine until after October 7. And he could have just never said anything, ever. He was holding a very liberal Zionist position, and he started arguing with people online. He posted this big Substack a few days later; it was a position that was a little bit more left, but still slop. And I was just feeling so crazy; I felt so awful. I am trying to do what I can from my position here and organizing with other writers, but I was getting so distracted by this dude on Supernatural. But I did keep engaging. I left this long comment on his Substack with sources. At the end of the day, I do know that that comment was mostly for other people; it’s just another form of education, but such a waste of energy. But I couldn’t break free, especially because I had such a severe attachment to Supernatural in my big sad, depressive episode of unemployment. And I was ashamed of what I was spending time on, and I was ashamed of the maintaining of a parasocial bond, of this kind of expectation from someone that I do not know. So, the shape of that poem turned from having a blast with my buddy to this very existential question of what I was doing and why, and if I had lived a different life, what I would withstand.
VM: I’m particularly drawn to these poems that recur throughout the collection—that function as long poems broken up and also simultaneously as a series of poems; I’m thinking of, among others, “The Angels are Falling” and “The Birds are Calling.” How did those poems come to be?
SF: “The Birds Are Calling” was all one poem at first. My earliest draft of that poem looks so different. I played around with it a lot, breaking it up, bringing it back together. If I looked at the original poem and the three poems as they are now, the third poem was basically entirely new. But it was big. I really love series where they all have the same title. I love how Leila Chatti does that in Deluge, I love how Hanif Abdurraqib does that in Fortune for Your Disaster. I have a lot of fun with those poems, where we’re not done with this container yet, and we can return to it. Like every poet, I have so many bird encounters in my life. And I wanted them to kind of mean something different throughout, and I wanted them to mark different relationships to space and being outside and observing the world.
I wrote the first iteration of “The Angels are Falling” after watching an episode of Supernatural—season 8, episode 23, “Sacrifice.” The angels are expelled from heaven, and one of the characters says: “The angels, they’re falling!” It’s such a beautiful scene; the sky is just lit up like comets. And I was really moved by that. I had watched that episode live when it aired when I was a teenager, but then returning to it, I just had a kind of different relationship to family and duty and fucking up. I broke it apart when I realized the first version was doing too many things, and that also gave me the opportunity to write into the different things that each of them was doing. The third one came about after I had had a very bad day, and I was walking and I was listening to Mitski’s “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars” on repeat for forty-five minutes, and walking around a bunch of cacti in my neighborhood, and I stopped on the side of the road, and I wrote the poem, and I looked at it, and realized it fit and it was a series. I enjoy repetition and the returning and the idea that a thought is never really through, and you can always come back to it and push on it more, and it might be something else. It might be contradictory, it might be the same, but from a different entry way.
VM: I’m interested also in the poem “Pelvic Floor Physical Therapy,” where, in the second and third sections of the poem, you use erasure, blacking out sections of text—the poem becomes simultaneously abundant in what is erased and very sparse and fragmentary in what remains. How did this poem come to be? Did the form start out this way, or did it shift over time?
SF: The first version of this poem, or the version that existed in the book during the editorial process, was very different. It was a standard open verse poem that was the text of the first prose block. It wasn’t even a prose poem! It was one of the rare times I didn’t write a prose poem. And the poem itself, I wrote while doing pelvic floor physical therapy. You enter a very specific state in doing those exercises, where there is a deep awareness of your body and all the ways in which your breath moves through it. I felt like I was astral projecting into the past every time I did those exercises. And so, I wrote the poem during a session. And then in editorial, my wonderful editor, Claire, just left a little comment,suggesting that we could do something else with the form there. I thought about it, and agreed, and I wanted the form to complement this poem more. I asked my friend Samia Saliba what she thought the most repressed poetic form was, and she suggested the burning haibun, because it literally conceals things. And I really enjoyed that in the process of the burning, it reveals something. It felt like the process of the therapy itself, a release of tension. For me, that tension is very wrapped up in repression and fear and anxiety. I liked the way that the poem mimicked the actual physical movements that I was engaging in that brought me to the poem in the first place. The form is created by torrin a. greathouse, who is a poet I admire a lot. The forms she creates are complementary to writing through chronic pain and illness, and it felt right to borrow something from her to put motion to this form about a deeply bodily thing.
VM: Throughout the collection, community remains central; poems for and about the Radius of Arab American Writers, poems that draw on and mention friends and other central people by name. How do you understand the relationship between community and pop culture and writing in your work as a poet?
SF: Writing for me, when it became something that I was taking seriously, was always around people. Slam is a very communal writing space. I felt like I was always writing poems with someone next to me, and so the act of writing poems became something through which I both made friends and also continued and sustained friendships. It felt that way as well after I graduated college and had writing communities outside of collegiate slam spaces. I like to write about what I’m experiencing, and a lot of those things boil down to watching TV and hanging out with my buddies, and so I love putting my friends in my work. I like naming them. It feels like citation. It’s not just that I was hanging out with someone and this happened, it’s not just that my friend said this, it’s that Frankie said this, and this is our conversation. I don’t care if people don’t know who Frankie is, but I care, and there’s a specificity to our friendship where this language could only be found in our interactions. Poetry has really sustained my life, and even when a lot of the people who are named aren’t poets and aren’t writers, they are people who engage with poetry through the way that I see it and how I engage with it. I’m really grateful for that too, to bring this thing that I love so very much to others, especially when it’s something that commonly is seen as inaccessible. Poetry and community are inextricable for me, and I like to bring poetry into every space I inhabit, because it’s something that I love a lot.
VM: Who are some of your influences as a poet and what are you currently reading?
SF: Hala Alyan is a really big influence for me. There’s a sharpness to how she builds an image, and there’s a momentum that her work has where it feels like words tumble into each other, and every poem feels like such a rush. I wanted so badly to be able to inhabit that language and that form. Aracelis Girmay too, and the tenderness and warmth with which she writes about people and communities, her family, her friends, or just people at the supermarket, was so impactful to me. I wouldn’t be writing the kind of friendship poems I write if it wasn’t for reading Teeth and Kingdom Animalia in particular.
Right now, I’m oscillating between a few books. m. mick powell’s Dead Girl Cameo, which is a sort of docupoetics project about famous Black and brown women entertainers who passed early. The elegy and warmth and investment in what lineages art leaves in that celebrity realm is awesome. I’m also reading a theoretical text by Rita Felski called Hooked: Art and Attachment. It’s a really fun, alternate way of approaching interpretation of a text by considering what attachment means and the different ways to be attached to something, whether through development of taste, or identification, or otherwise. It’s making me think a lot about my own work and how I engage with stuff critically. I’m also reading The Vampire Lestat in anticipation of the AMC Interview with the Vampire series.
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.
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Vika Mujumdar is a writer and critic based in Western Massachusetts. She was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India, and holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. A 2025-2026 NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow, her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, Public Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She works for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and edits Liminal Transit Review.
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