Water & Salt

by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Overview

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's debut, Water & Salt, sings in the voices of people ravaged by cycles of war and news coverage. These poems alternately rage, laugh, celebrate and grieve, singing in the voices of people ravaged by cycles of war and news coverage and inviting the reader to see the human lives lived beyond the headlines.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597090292
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/27/2017
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	157,272
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet of Palestinian, Jordanian and Syrian heritage. Her poems have been published in American and international journals including Blackbird, The Boiler, Borderlands Texas Review, The Indianola Review, James Franco Review, The Lake for Poetry, Lunch Ticket, Mizna, The Ofi Press Mexico, Sukoon, and the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art. Several of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, “Immigrant” in 2015 and for “Middle Village” and “Ruin” in 2016. She is an MFA candidate at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Redmond, Washington, with her family.

Read an Excerpt

Tu’burni

“Tu’burni” is a common Syrian term of endearment that translates as “bury me” and means “I love you so much I hope I’m the one that dies first.”

As a child, the syrup of my grandmother’s lilting sweet nothings seemed otherworldly.
Her Syrian phrases stretched wide as an embrace,
jasmine petals bathed in her laughter.
Tu’burni—bury me!
Beloved of my heart my life and my soul.

When I balked at the dark prayer wrapped in love’s silks my mother translated:
Let me be the one who goes first,
let my heart never live a day without you,
children should bury their elders.

In my grandmother’s old
Damascus neighborhood,
slender-limbed boys and girls scrubbed clean of war’s detritus sleep soundlessly in shrouds against the stone wall of a schoolroom.

The dark prayer,
unanswered,
burns to white ash.
In the homeland of jasmine,
childhood drowned in a poison with no fragrance.

Table of Contents

I You Will Need to State the Reason for Your Visit

Upon Arrival 15

Grand mothering 16

Time Travel 17

Rules for Recitation 20

Immigrant 22

My English Teacher Tells Me 24

Damascus Dowry Chest 26

Dhayaa' 27

Circling the Dome of the Sky 28

Eating the Earth 29

Tu'burni 31

II Emerging From the Ancient Wound

Drowning 35

Mountain, Stone 36

Water & Salt 37

Running Orders 39

Abu Nasser 41

Intifada Portrait 43

Again and Again 45

Ruin 47

Blue Morning Music 49

Mount Sinjar 52

Newsworthy 54

Superpowers 58

Exceptional 60

It's Beirut out Here 61

III Amulets for the Journey

Almond Trilogy 65

National Security Advisory 68

Wasta 70

Instructions for Making Arabic Coffee 72

Amman Coiffure 74

My Mother Returns to Her Childhood Home 75

The Whole Point 77

Translation 79

Lighthouse 80

Relocation 81

Many Hats 84

Middle Village 85

Time Management 87

Copybooks 89

Linger 91

Cruising Altitude 93

Naming It 94

Subterranean 95

Notes 97

Editorial Reviews

Aside from wheat, essential ingredients for making bread are water and salt. And in Lena Tuffaha’s luminous poems, she provides the necessary words to feed our humanity. The poems in Water & Salt are fearless and frank. They speak of a place where a phone call announces doom and where ‘portraits find their frames.’ But always, despite the violence and war, in the music of Tuffaha’s poetry there is a clear summons, beckoning us to join in the feast of her language. These are poems that rise, surge, and stir us.” —Oliver de La Paz, author of Requiem for the Orchard

“Arab-American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poems are both mirror and zaatar, sharing a clear-eyed picture of our sometimes-brutal world—as in the acid clarity of her ‘Running Orders’—and also feeding us from the harvest of possibility: “the song of zaatar simmering / in its native oil rises up / and time evaporates.’ Her auspicious debut Water & Salt, named after the primal ingredients for slaking our thirst and satisfying our tongues, carries with it the aching wisdom of immigrants and mothers, whose lives are fraught with departure and carved by longing. Yet she turns the ominous language of border control into the tender music of trochaic hexameter: ‘You will need to state the reason for your visit,’ and encourages us travelers that ‘the story / is still being written and / our fractures aren’t done setting.’” —Philip Metres, author of A Concordance of Leaves, winner of the Arab American Book Award

From the Publisher

04/15/2017
Of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian heritage, Tuffaha offers a beautifully crafted debut that uses clear, observant language to explore the immigrant experience and the burdens of ongoing war. As she explains, "We travel back not to// because even now/ after we've lived longer// here than anywhere else// we still think of this place// as new." Writing crucially helps her negotiate that newness—"The hollows of write/ are lined with bookshelves/ and speak spirals off my tongue into stories"—as it helps her negotiate reentry into a brutalized homeland. Even as she notes the fragrance of almond blossoms, she observes: "Today again. Smoke-charred throats/ suffocating." VERDICT Taking her from Beirut, Baghdad, Afghanistan, and a once-imprisoned Palestinian friend "whose eyes are like two pools of olive/ oil about to ignite," Tuffaha's journey is both immediately relevant and timelessly poetic.

Library Journal