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.

The Lord God Bird

Birdnote.org, etc.

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Busy day in our country today, so I’m cheating a bit and just making announcements and reposting from elsewhere.

First, I have been meaning to tell you about two upcoming readings — as it is National Poetry Month, there are many, all over the place —

  1. I’ll be reading at Edmonds Bookshop on Thursday, April 17, 6:30 p.m., with four other poets from David D. Horowitz’s Rose Alley Press; besides David and myself, you can hear Carolyne Wright, Jane Alynn, and Jed Meyers, 10 minutes each. It will be fun.
  2. I am a featured poet at Everett Poetry Night‘s open mike on Monday, April 21. This is scheduled 5-8 p.m., and, yes, I have been there before, but I don’t think it begins at 5:00. More like gathering begins. People grab food and drink and chat. When I tried to pin this down (I can’t be there until 5:30), host Duane Kirby Jensen said, “Show up when you can!” Everett Poetry Night has a page on Facebook, too, but after Nov. 5, I left Facebook so can’t send you there to fact-check me.

I was up early this morning and read a chapbook that I am preparing to review for Escape Into Life (EIL). Rather than try to come up with another book, and a post here, I am reposting the April 4 episode of Bird Note, featuring none other than my dear friend, poet, and Empty Bowl Press editor Holly Hughes.

It is 11 minutes — features 3 of Holly’s poems from Passings (click on this link to see my review of Passings) — and is so so worth it.

Bird Note, April 4, 2025

https://birdnote.org/podcasts/birdnote-daily/poet-holly-j-hughes-honors-birds-weve-lost

At Holly’s website she includes a quote from Jane Hirshfield, “Poetry is the practice of attention.” So is all of life, a lesson that our poems might teach others.

 

NPM #2: Oubliettes of Light

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OUBLIETTES OF LIGHT, Lisa Ashley. MoonPath Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 27142, 2025, 73 pages, $17.99, paper, http://MoonPathPress.com.

What a pleasure for me to begin National Poetry Month with a blog-review of Lisa Ashley’s debut book of poetry, Oubliettes of Light.

An oubliette is a secret dungeon, accessible only through a trapdoor at the top. In these poems, we encounter multiple trapdoors, and we drop through them into dark, painful histories: the Armenian genocide, fragmented stories of violence handed down through the generations (along with family recipes, and a thirst for survival). A father provides for his family, and bullies and abuses his wife and children. A mother escapes into her flower garden, and into a bottle of Scotch. Lisa Ashley, the middle child of seven, escapes the family home in rural New York State, makes her way West, finds love and motherhood, becomes a chaplain working with incarcerated youth.

And, lucky for us, she eventually finds her way to poetry.

In my attempt to capture Ashley’s book in a quick paragraph, I had to ask myself, what makes me love this book? Why would I call it a pleasure? Why will anyone else love these poems? Let me walk you through my thought process. Consider these lines opening the first poem, “Grandmother’s Story Stone”:

I know no Armenian, she no English.
Like a pupil at attention, she sits
in her straight chair by the cookstove,
shuffles pages back to front
in her Armenian Bible. She mutters,
gnarled fingers rowing.

Several lines later we get our first glimpse of the poet: “I whisper behind my hand / scubbity, scubbity, scubbity.” How else to translate an incomprehensible past? What do you hear: scubbity. What do you see: “cotton stockings [as they] sloop / into ankle bracelets.” What do you smell: “garlic, olive oil, mint, her perfume.”

Above all, these are poems of witness. Necessary to the times we live in.

But, importantly, the poems in Oubliettes of Light are not trapdoors one falls through into darkness, they are not about trauma. These poems are about healing from trauma. They are about the solace one finds in a well-lived maturity. Not dungeons, but the unexpected doors opening above us into light. A child and a young adult taking in all that happens around her and processing it; a woman on a spiritual path of awareness and reclamation.

I Went Out to Hear

after Leila Chatti

I went out to hear
birdsong. Layered
in springtime air like icing
on cake sweet
clamor of joy,
praise song to life.
I hear the undertow of bees,
find one dancing
on the poppy’s green ball
in the arms of ivory pistils,
lavender petals ten times the bee’s size
wave a Victorian fan flirtation.
Standing stock still, eyes locked,
knees heavy with pollen, I’m lost,
beat fevered wings
willing to work
this singular moment forever.

—Lisa Ashley

Years of work—personal work on herself, and work on the poetry—went into the making of this book. It shows on every page. Because I know how late she came to poetry, and how seriously she has taken it, I asked Lisa to describe her writing journey. This is what she wrote back (with her permission, I have lightly edited and shortened it) — it’s a blueprint for the later-in-life poet:

I was 60 years old when I crossed the threshold from prose writing (journalism, marketing, academic papers, sermons) to poetry writing. I was an absolute neophyte. My fundamental love of learning was my ally. It was like finding a secret, enormous treasure trove. I had never studied poetry in college. I had never read poetry in any serious way. I was familiar with Mary Oliver’s work because her poems were used so often in Unitarian Universalist services that folks in the congregations referred to themselves as the “Church of Mary Oliver.” I liked her work and the few poets I had come across in the past: Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare. I had no grounding in how to read and appreciate poetry, although I felt drawn to it. In 2014, after a sermon, a congregant invited me to come to her writing group. I knew her to be a kind person so I went. From there I began to take online classes and workshops, taught by excellent poets including Ellen Bass, Jane Hirshfield, Dorianne Laux, James Crews and Danusha Laméris. I joined a newly formed workshop group on Bainbridge and subscribed to on-line poetry venues that delivered a poem daily to my inbox. I was eager to learn as much as I could. I wrote many poems and began to submit to journals. I published my first poem in 2019. In May 2024 I submitted my manuscript to MoonPath Press, to the Sally Albiso Award contest. I was a finalist and was chosen for publication. I continue to read poetry every day, listen to poetry podcasts, and have committed to writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month. You could say I approach poetry as an immersive experience, and write poems to explore who I am, and to heal.

In closing, this is an inspiring book, open-hearted and encouraging.

You can find Oubliettes of Light at MoonPath, or through Bookshop.org. To see Lisa’s brand new (and lovely) web site, follow this link: https://www.lisaashleypoet.com.