Zeina Abirached, author of the graphic novel A Game for Swallows, returns with a powerful collection of wartime memories. Abirached was born in Lebanon in 1981. She grew up in Beirut as fighting between Christians and Muslims divided the city streets.

Follow her past cars riddled with bullet holes, into taxi cabs that travel where buses refuse to go, and on outings to collect shrapnel from the sidewalk. With striking black-and-white artwork, Abirached recalls the details of ordinary life inside a war zone.

The Years Distilled are the verses from twenty years of spoken word and performance poetry on stages and in coffee houses around the United States. While the collection only represents a small fraction of the writing done over two decades (1990-2010), it is an almost complete collection of the pieces performed.

The ranting and rambling contained within this book is often juvenile, sometimes petty, and commonly complaining; however, all the works are born of passion. The people and places that inspired the words between these covers are too numerous to mention individually, but they are all held very dear. It is because these souls, times, and locations have touched so deeply that a permanent mark was left.

These memories are now yours to share, for what they're worth.

These are all very different works of varied style and subject matter, plucked at random from a collection of writing. They are in no order whatsoever. What is the common thread? Every one of them was written to be performed, and with only two exceptions, they all have been.