Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Something about Living

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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.

 

Elder Voices

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ELDER VOICES: WISTFUL, WONDERING, WISE, Editors Marie Eaton, Carla Shafer, and Angela Boyle. Elder Voices Project, Bellingham, Washington.

This anthology collects poems and essays from elders living in Whatcom County, Washington. The launch featured six writers, ending with 100-year-old essayist, Maggie Weisberg, who charmed all of us by announcing, before reading “On Being Old,” that the 70- and 80-year-olds in the audience could be her children.

It’s a cornucopia of delights, calling forth memories of childhood and loved ones long gone, embracing the natural world of years back, and the natural world still left to us, looking forward to new adventures. These are not people taking up their rocking chairs. They’re still growing, changing, writing.

Age Is Relative

Still kicking at sixty-nine years old,
one year short of Dad’s death,
four years past older Sister’s passing,
peering toward Mom’s eight,
astonished by Aunt’s ninety-three,
and still searching for
some sort of meaning
after all these years.

— Nancy Kay Peterson

If I had to sum up the book in one word? “Celebration.”

Old Growth

When two old friends stand together
in the forest for six hundred years and
feel the rain prickle against their shredding
bark, feel the heat of the morning press
into their needles on sloping limbs, feel
their silent lives raised from the forest floor
in a flow of phloem and xylem, we pass by
mindful of their presence, as if we mattered
and they rose in service to us — their shade,
their fibers, even their core (where friendship
lives) — sawn through and framed to form
our rooms. Or, mindful of our significance
as less than theirs, walking beneath the canopy
we would kneel, learn the pattern
of their breathing, feel the rain
dampen our sweaters, absorb
the heat of enduring friendship.

— Carla Shafer

Chock-full of inspiration, it’s a project I hope to see duplicated elsewhere. You can find a copy at Village Books, located in Fairhaven, and on-line.

Susan Rich: Blue Atlas

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I really would like to post 30 times about 30 different poets during National Poetry Month, but — let me admit up front — I’m lowering thresholds all over the place. Soon I’ll be lying inert in the doorway and you’ll have to step over me. But not today! Today, we get a poem from Seattle poet, editor, and teacher Susan Rich.

It’s a book that needs to come with a trigger warning — a young woman, a forced abortion. In the words of Diane Seuss the poems of Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press, 2024), “chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss,” and transform “anger into amber.”

The long poem “How did I love him — ” with lines like “West African highlife beat,” and “his baritone psalms, his siren pleas” — I just don’t know where to begin. I think of my young adult daughters, and my heart breaks.

But here’s one poem, from the section, “The Decision”:

Your Still Life Builds a Home Inside My Head

In the late afternoon we lose an f-stop
as light bleeds out of the bandaged sky

and like phantom detectives with wide-brimmed hats

we reexamine the compass, the passport,
the magnetized color of four o’clock air.

In this woman-made harbor, we rearrange

pipe stands and glass slides. We multitask wicker stands
where objects could topple at any time —

let them topple! 

Here in the land of deferred decisions,
a hand-painted garden ball reflects on a floating scroll.

In this alchemical mirror, in this ark of a studio —

built on instinct and breath, through windows
clouded and smeared,

under the sign of the light meter

I’ll meet you here. A bright space to hold inside my head,
an open country — another life still new.

— Susan Rich

It’s a book and a life “cracked open” (“Once Mother and Father Were Buried”), and the poems crack open the subject matter — Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop make appearances, as do images from pop culture, and the world of music. My introduction to Blue Atlas arrived via a Zoom with Olympia Poetry Network (OPN), and hearing Rich’s remarkable, memorable presentation made the book stick in my mind. I had to get my hands on it and read the poems for myself. Given the recent attack on Roe vs. Wade, I kept thinking of that oft-quoted passage from William Carlos Williams:

It is hard to get the news from poetry, yet men [women! people!] die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

These are honest, difficult, and necessary poems. To paraphrase what Rich wrote about June Jordan in a recent Substack Post, These are poems we need right now.

You can learn more about the book at Red Hen Press: https://redhen.org/book/blue-atlas/.

Click THIS LINK to find Rich’s Substack (and information about Poets on the Coast), and here’s a “real” review of Blue Atlas from Tinderbox:

Review of Blue Atlas by Susan Rich

Serhiy Zhadan: How Fire Descends

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HOW FIRE DESCENDS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, Serhiy Zhadan. Translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2023, 136 pages, paper, $18, yalebooks.yale.edu.

I purchased this book last April, but have put off blogging about it because I would love to attempt to do it justice. A beautiful book, moving poems, by a poet — musician, activist, Ukrainian soldier — I admire so much.

My home life has been challenging of late, a husband’s illness, and so forth, but I read poets such as Zhadan and think, surely I have no excuse not to write. 

So, here, just one poem from the book, and my highest recommendation.

 

“Remember Every Building”

Remember every building and every street, you tell me.

Remember everything that disappears like a traveler descending a hill.

Saying it out loud will drive away the silence and ward off trouble.

Just try to remember this light which pierces the apartments and roofs through and through.

Right now — when there is no turning back from September.

Right now — when we embrace as if we were at the wedding of other people’s children.

Remember these figures in the streets, refined by exhaustion and love.

Remember the ability of birds to come together in the autumn air,

the ability to absorb a person’s fear and warmth, hidden under their shirt,

the joy of recognizing who is on your side by a slight turn of the head.

Despite the wind, remember the breath, the presence, the eruption of language.

As you choose your words: just try to remember this month,

which changes everything, these trees, growing like children, easily growing into maturity.

September 11, 2022

— Serhiy Zhadan

I took a photo of the poem because I am certain the long lines will not translate onto your screen:

In the foreword, Ilya Kaminsky calls Zhadan “the most beloved Ukrainian poet of his generation.” After outlining the poet’s experiences previous to and throughout the current on-going war with Putin’s Russia, Kaminsky adds:

But Zhadan’s writing also manages to transcend his own landscape through his exploration of the dualities and connections between seemingly unlike things. For years he has sought to define the mysterious relationship between war and language. He is a public person who seeks to render visible the most intimate experiences of lovers, knowing all too well that “a language disappears when no one speaks of love.” He is a symbol of his country’s hope and resistance… (p. xii)

I wrote about Zhadan in April of 2023, and you’ll find a bunch of interesting links to follow there.

borrowed from gettyimages