Kaan and Her Sisters

by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Overview

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's Kaan and Her Sisters illuminates the work of grief and survival, the sordid legacies of official historical record and the liberatory practice of intimate narration. Tuffaha writes in the liminal space between languages, personifying Arabic verbs who guide the reader through a "history hurtling into the future." Kaan and Her Sisters centers character of the Arabic teacher, Miss Sahar, whose progressive displacements from Palestine and across Arab cities unfold in epistles, refashioned songs, and glimpses into the interiors of her lost home. In these disclosures, a study of time and a record of resistance to erasure emerges, and at its heart, the women who keep intergenerational memory. "Our mothers miraculous, persevering./No maps are new to the ancestors."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949487145
Publisher:	Trio House Press
Publication date:	07/01/2023
Pages:	86
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.21(d)

About the Author

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her work has appeared in the Nation, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, and Southern Humanities Review. Her debut collection of poems, Water & Salt, won the 2018 Washington State Book Award and was a finalist for the Arab American Book Award. She lives in Redmond, Washington with her family.

Editorial Reviews

07/24/2023

In this imaginative and searching collection, Tuffaha (Water and Salt) weaves intergenerational memory into a beautiful, haunting, and intimate portrait of survival that serves as a critique of violence. In one poem, Tuffaha uses the phrase “imagined geography,” which is, in turn, an apt description for how her writing transcends time and place. Centered on an Arabic teacher, Miss Sahar, who “taught us poetry, a vessel/ made of the ocean it traveled,” these poems offer “a new grammar for this country.” There are powerful images throughout (“I strung my tears like pearls on silk thread”) as Tuffaha meditates on the juxtaposition of happiness (“Happiness is land/ where no one thirsts”) and grief (“To grieve is to relinquish the child who travels”). As such, these poems reveal what is lost when families are displaced and tragedy becomes all too common. They also serve as a testament to what is possible through the love of those same families, and through the ordinary will to remember: “I know the few letters needed for understanding.” Tuffaha depicts the world in all its pain and possibility. (July)

Publishers Weekly