Tag Archive for: Lena Khalaf Tuffah

SOMETHING ABOUT LIVING, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. The University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio, 2024, 81 pages, paper, $16.95, https://www.uakron.edu/uapress/.

Trying to keep this to a simple appreciation of a poem, and failing, especially with this startling and powerful collection.  Something about Living won the 2024 National Book Award, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha has a whole host of prizes behind her. To introduce her, I’ll borrow from the review at Publisher’s Weekly:

The brilliant third collection from Tuffaha (Kaan and Her Sisters), who is of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian descent, evokes the weight of a homeland’s genocide, but is equally about the joys of heritage and the righteous pursuit of justice for one’s oppressed brothers and sisters. She eloquently captures the dichotomy of pain and comfort: “Be it a home;/ ancient breath and second/ letter of ancestry. Home of unripe figs// or of suffering?” In “Triptych,” Tuffaha alternates language from the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights with phrasing from an Israeli tourism ad (“No one belongs here more than you do”), highlighting the inherent disconnect between this welcoming attitude and the violent displacement of Palestinians from the region.

— Publisher’s Weekly

It’s a book you will want to hold in your hands. Some of it not in English, some poems sprawling or shattered across the page. Here’s one that runs down the left margin, but even so manages to be unconventional.

In Case of Emergency

M. K., 1938-2023

This is how you open the box
when I am no longer here.

One of these might be the combination:

1975
The year you were born

1967
The year we lost the rest of our country

1936
The year your grandmother swallowed her gold coins
to hide them from the soldiers

This is how you keep yourself
safe, keep parts

of yourself in different boxes.
Trust no one
with everything

1949
The year my father died

1979
The year the checkpoint taught you
The difference between your name and your passport

1999
The year the last of our olives were uprooted
and the wall obscured Jerusalem

This is how you know it will end:

When night falls the windows of the city
become mirrors, a key recalls
the shape of its doorway, the stones of this land
nestle in young hands.

— Lena Khalaf Tuffah

If you have been writing your own original poems for National Poetry Month, you might try this form — your life (or the life of someone, like M. K., to be commemorated) —  condensed into a series of landmark years and events.

To learn more about the author, begin with poetry.org, or visit her interview after winning the Washington State Book Award in 2017.