Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

I enjoyed Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s earlier poetry collection Water & Salt (see my earlier post here: https://www.daniellejhanson.com/recommended-reading-1/2018/6/18/water-salt-by-lena-khalaf-tuffaha). So I was excited to read her latest volume Something About Living. It lived up to high expectations. Tuffaha’s poems exhibit an openness and vulnerability—an airiness—like a bloom opening. The poems are frank about the Palestinian loss of land and ties. These poems were written before the past, difficult year. They are not angry, but melancholy, nostalgic, gorgeous and heart-rending. Buy here.

From “Apricots”

. . . Last summer in Rome, turning

the corner onto Piazza di Santa Maria,

the clink of the morning’s last cappuccino glasses

and low growls of Vespas on the street

gave no indication of the city I would travel to

a few steps forward. I wasn’t thinking

of the jam-colored sunsets of Amman, the stone

fruits and wedding music that filled my grandmother’s garden,

the serrated leaves of her apricot tree. Then a scent

drifted up from the cobblestones. A thickness,

a palpable haze of flesh beginning

to spoil, of sugar turning in sunlight.

In Amman, a tree like the one leaning

on a wall in the piazza had reigned over

our childhood, . . .

From “Madwoman Ghazal”

It is true we named our own sea dead

but in the houses nearby the bougainvillea flourishes. . .

From “Dukka”

. . . Love is the children we carried

at the protests, leading their own marches in the rain.

Let the stars fall. I have no idea

what hope is, but our people

have taught me a million ways to love.