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Something About Living
It’s nearly impossible to write poetry that holds the human desire for joy and the insistent agitations of protest at the same time, but Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s gorgeous and wide-ranging new collection Something About Living does just that. Her poems interweave Palestine’s historic suffering, the challenges of living in this world full of violence and ill will, and the gentle delights we embrace to survive that violence. Khalaf Tuffaha’s elegant poems sing the fractured songs of Diaspora while remaining clear-eyed to the cause of the the multinational hubris of colonialism and greed. This collection is her witness to our collective unraveling, vowel by vowel, syllable by syllable. “Let the plural be a return of us” the speaker of “On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals” says and this plurality is our tenuous humanity and the deep need to hang on to kindness in our communities. In these poems Khalaf Tuffaha reminds us that love isn’t an idea; it is a radical act. Especially for those who, like this poet, travel through the world vigilantly, but steadfastly remain heart first. —Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World
- GenresPoetryNonfiction
81 pages, Paperback
First published April 2, 2024
About the author
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
9 books45 followersLena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (UAkron, 2024), winner of the 2024 National Book Award and winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry, Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award, Water & Salt (Red Hen), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention for the 2018 Arab American Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize, and Letters from the Interior (Diode, 2019), finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.
Her writing has been published in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Nation, Poets.org, Protean, and Prairie Schooner and in anthologies including The Long Devotion (Georgia Press), We Call to the Eye and the Night (Persea Press), and Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books). She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series “Poems from Palestine” at the Baffler magazine. In 2024 she curated a year-long subscription of Palestinian poetry books with Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore.
Khalaf Tuffaha spent ten years working with journalists and editors as a volunteer for Seattle's Arab American community organizations. She helped to tell the stories of people living between two homelands, people who speak in translation and navigate the realities of long wars. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writing Workshop.
Khalaf Tuffaha was born in Seattle, Washington but she was raised in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. She has lived the experiences of first-generation American, immigrant, and expatriate. Her heritage is Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian and she is fluent in Arabic and English. She has lived in and traveled across the Arab world, and many of her poems are inspired by the experience of crossing cultural, geographic and political borders, borders between languages, between the present and the living past.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is passionate about a Free Palestine, the perfect cup of coffee, poetry, language, and gardening. She lives with her family in Redmond, Washington
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December 8, 2024
‘All language is legend—we grow into its landscapes,’ writes poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha as collection Something About Living plunges us into bombarded landscapes of Palestine, language and love on a vessel of prose that is as playful as it is powerful. Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for poetry, and certainly deservingly so, the poems here turn their attention to aspects of language and translation amidst ongoing violence and erasure against Palestinians as well as the systems of imperialism and capitalism that enable such horrors and shift language itself. As Edward Said wrote, ‘each Palestinian structure presents itself as a potential ruin,’ and Tuffaha’s poems weave through not only the destruction of violence but also the ways language itself can be ruinous, such as the dehumanization of Palestinians in news headlines, the renaming of cities, or the diasporic struggles of Palestinian Americans attempting to speak ‘unhindered by residual evidence / of your heritage.’ Though through harnessing a poetic heritage of Palestinian writers such as Mahmoud Darwish, Zakaria Mohammad, Naomi Shihab Nye, Suheir Hammad, Edward Said and others like June Jordan and Nâzım Hikmet, even if ‘all language is littered with the corpses of words,’ Lena Khalaf Tuffaha still uses this graveyard of language to craft the beautiful flowers Darwish wrote about when he said ‘a poem in a difficult time / is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.’ This is an impressive and important collection that also makes for quite the incredible reading experience.
‘That a heart will not back down
when an armored vehicle barrels toward it
is also a love story’
—from On Translation
‘All language is oracular,’ posits Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and this attempt to understand it while also utilizing it is at the heart of Something About Living. ‘My ongoing inquiry and interest is the way language moves and changes and changes us who make it,’ Tuffaha told the Seattle Times, ‘and the ways in which language, instead of illuminating, is often used to obfuscate or erase.’ Language is often the tools we use not only to express ourselves, but to understand the world and events around us and as is shown across these poems, imperialism strips the colonized people of narrative control over themselves but also control over the language. ‘Whatever histories we were raised on have come to an end,’ she writes on how language can be a form of cultural erasure and many of these poems ring out in protest against such imperialist rhetoric and linguistic recalibration. For instance, in the poem Crowdsourced she writes:
‘Discard the imperial names of cities and villages.
Share the story of watermelon days, your family’s address a Jerusalem
Street you won’t be allowed to enter.
Say liberation where before you spoke of endings.’
A later series of poems, Triptych is in response to the statement “No one belongs here more than you do” which was printed as a tourism ad for Israel in a US magazine in 1998 during a period of rapid growth in Israeli settlements in occupied West Bank and Gaza. The final part of the triptych is made up of lines from various Palestinian authors such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Mahmoud Darwish, Fadwa Tuqan, Nathalie Handal and aptly titled Reclamation Cento:
In the mirror of my heart you can find no shelter.
One woman loses 15 maybe 20 members of her family, one garden at a time.
I belong to the road and nothing belongs to me.
Out here, eyes find the edge that isn’t one.
I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee,
stronger than memory, and sadder than sadness.
We are all waiting for you, you who have come so far.
Do not underestimate this rubble.
This need to have the narrative control over your own life is also the nature of the June Jordan quote from her poem Moving Towards Home (you can read it HERE) that serves as the epigraph for the collection, highlighting the need to speak in one’s own language ‘where the land is not bullied and beaten into a tombstone.’ Jordan appears multiple times across the collection, such as the poem addressed directly to her, and has long been an advocate for Palestine, such as in the documentary A Place of Rage where Jordan stated that ‘ a litmus test for morality’ was ‘what you're prepared to do on behalf of the Palestinian people’ (the other being standing up for queer people). In Letter to June Jordan in September, Taffah considers Jordan’s work and the ‘life of poetry’ in a constant existence where ‘our families are hauled off to the world of the dead, and every day it is on screen.’ Yet despite the daily horrors, the world often turns a blind eye. ‘Occasionally you are permitted to speak about the dead,’ she says later in Crowdsourced on the ways media often burdens Palestinan struggles with what Edward Said describes in The Question of Palestine as ‘completely asymmetrical records of destruction’ with a ‘rhetoric of outrage’ against Palestinians contrasted with ‘the rhetoric of neutrality used to describe Israeli attacks.’ And while ‘this poem is not a passport,’ each poem transports the reader into this uncomfortable space where language is both a necessity and a weapon that can be turned against you by forces of control that will manipulate language to uphold its own destructive powers.
To Be Self-Evident
(after Edward Said)
Every empire tells its subjects a story
of revelation. The trees let down
their aging leaves, listless
in late drought. The children thrive on filtration,
their classroom air and their selfies sanitized.
Every empire seems invincible
as its borders submerge, its manicured hillsides
incinerate between guaranteed
next-day deliveries.
Every empire eulogizes
its value system, splurges
for pyrotechnics, decorates
its mausoleums for the holidays.
Every empire turns
against its colonies, cradling
the embassy’s crystal in bubble wrap,
packing extra treats for the dogs on the evacuation flight home.
Every empire promises
a revolution against itself. The children
are tasked with designing the future, growing
walls of hydroponic greens,
rebranding old protest anthems.
Every empire denies the iceberg
it crashes into, hires a chorus, funds the arts.
Every empire sings itself a lullaby.
In her article The Work of Witness, journalist Sarah Aziza asks ‘three months into a livestreamed genocide, we must ask—what does all this looking do?’ Similarly, in her poem Long Distance Tuffaha asks ‘who imagines this poem is for them?’ While these poems certainly address ongoing events that are important for the world to pay attention to, Tuffaha has spoken against the idea of being a “poet of witness,” something she finds misses the purpose for ease of fitting it into a marketing trope. ‘This book for me felt very pointedly against that posture,’ she said in an interview with the Institute for Palestine Studies, referencing fellow Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah who also decried how the term ‘binds the poet to stereotype.’ Tuffah agrees, calling it “a trap”:
Still, much of this collection looks at how language can bind us and the importance of being heard and seen and why translation is important for this reason. ‘To translate is to believe there is a reader,’ she writes, and there is the hope we will look and listen.
‘Tonight/between translations/when we carried a poem/from one country into another language/where perhaps the imperative doesn't land/with the Same iron blow/as the original/I recounted the story of a theater of people listening to a young poet become/apocryphal/and gathering his lines/as fast as they could and then I tried/to say that the one/word he used for writing and recording/would require a sentence or a story or a pantheon/to capture it and I thought of the word/I have come to hate most in English/which is peace/because it is always pointed at my skull/and I am supposed to want/it more than my own name.’
—from Iconic
In an interview with Yale Review, Fady Joudah refers to the idea of “poet of witness” as a marketing term that earns value only if ‘empathy proves profitable’ (I wrote about this HERE). In Something About Living, Tuffaha similarly confronts the ways capitalism and the language of marketing is detrimental to language and culture by implying hierarchy ranking people by value. In her poem This Day Our Daily Bread in memory of ‘the most recent largest mass shooting’ where she quips ‘you should shelter in place / while every vote counts,’ Tuffaha employs corporate marketing language to show how it sanitizes language to both dismiss and uphold atrocities. ‘The locusts walk among us’ she warns. But there is a rather playful nature to her prose and formatting despite the heavy content, such as In Palestine There which makes playful use of the word “post” such as references to letters that tie it back to a previous poem, Envelope and ends with the line ‘once we leave a place is it there?’ Or there is the poem Slipshape which takes the form of a golden shovel on the line ‘On the brink of war, may we / remember how divine / human beings can be.’ from the poem On the Brink Of… by Suheir Hammad.
Slipshape
A hummingbird lavishes the lilac on
the first morning I am by myself and the
open window ushers in decanted perfume, sea, rain on the brink
of falling. What slipshape prayers a woman must make of
her body. To write my way out of the stories of war
I wrote the war again and again I wrote its wounds. May
arrives in a frenzy of questions. Whose children will we
lose at the border? What use is it to remember
what has never ended, to elegize how
ardently we believed? This is not who we are becomes anthem, divine
chorus, armor against the living. Our human
excesses, our florid silences, our repetitions, indelicate. Beings
so brittle any one of the next days might break us. Can
we, finally, and can we imagine what our new shapes might be?
Perhaps the most playful—and easily one of my favorites in the collection—is Beit Anya (read it HERE is really interested in language as lineage and as a site of belonging, and language as place.’ It takes its title from the former name for her father’s ancestral home meaning “House of the Poor” or “House of Affliction,” a city on the Mount of Olives occupied since the Six Day War in 1967 where Israel chopped down olive trees and intentionally ruined the crops in order to starve the people. Tuffaha contrasts this with the woes of a house of the gods and a House of unripe figs and writes ‘All language is volition, / the rising up of a body // thought lifeless’ to remind us that this was also the home to Lazarus of the Bible.
‘So little is spoken of
love and its fractured geography’
There is still plenty of love to be found within this collection amidst all the violence and destruction and family is a central theme that binds these poems much like how it binds us all together. Yet, with the generations of struggles, Palestinian diaspora and refugee status is a sad truth for many Palestinains. The poem First Generation looks at families who must decide to leave or remain, with ancestors saying ‘if we left, it was for fear / of what might fall’ but also ‘if we remained, it was for fear / of what would be taken.’ This is a struggle that is ongoing as the Israeli military continues to massacre civilians with aid from major nations like the US. During her acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Tuffaha stated:
It is a lesson we should all heed and spread and reading this collection is a perfect opportunity to listen, learn and share. ‘Let the plural be / a return of us’ she writes and the gathering of people together in protest is a plea of hope.
‘Some days poems are scrawled on pieces of cardboard and carried on our shoulders at the protest like martyrs. Here I should say something about hope. Here I should say something about living.’
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something About Living is a collection certainly deserving of its accolades. Winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry and the 2024 National Book Award for poetry, this is a collection that hits hard with prose as playful as it is incisive. A haunting but necessary read, and one of the best collections I’ve read this year.
5/5
‘Let the stars fall. I have no idea
what hope is, but our people
have taught me a million ways to love.’
—from Dukka
‘That a heart will not back down
when an armored vehicle barrels toward it
is also a love story’
—from On Translation
‘All language is oracular,’ posits Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and this attempt to understand it while also utilizing it is at the heart of Something About Living. ‘My ongoing inquiry and interest is the way language moves and changes and changes us who make it,’ Tuffaha told the Seattle Times, ‘and the ways in which language, instead of illuminating, is often used to obfuscate or erase.’ Language is often the tools we use not only to express ourselves, but to understand the world and events around us and as is shown across these poems, imperialism strips the colonized people of narrative control over themselves but also control over the language. ‘Whatever histories we were raised on have come to an end,’ she writes on how language can be a form of cultural erasure and many of these poems ring out in protest against such imperialist rhetoric and linguistic recalibration. For instance, in the poem Crowdsourced she writes:
‘Discard the imperial names of cities and villages.
Share the story of watermelon days, your family’s address a Jerusalem
Street you won’t be allowed to enter.
Say liberation where before you spoke of endings.’
A later series of poems, Triptych is in response to the statement “No one belongs here more than you do” which was printed as a tourism ad for Israel in a US magazine in 1998 during a period of rapid growth in Israeli settlements in occupied West Bank and Gaza. The final part of the triptych is made up of lines from various Palestinian authors such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Mahmoud Darwish, Fadwa Tuqan, Nathalie Handal and aptly titled Reclamation Cento:
In the mirror of my heart you can find no shelter.
One woman loses 15 maybe 20 members of her family, one garden at a time.
I belong to the road and nothing belongs to me.
Out here, eyes find the edge that isn’t one.
I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee,
stronger than memory, and sadder than sadness.
We are all waiting for you, you who have come so far.
Do not underestimate this rubble.
This need to have the narrative control over your own life is also the nature of the June Jordan quote from her poem Moving Towards Home (you can read it HERE) that serves as the epigraph for the collection, highlighting the need to speak in one’s own language ‘where the land is not bullied and beaten into a tombstone.’ Jordan appears multiple times across the collection, such as the poem addressed directly to her, and has long been an advocate for Palestine, such as in the documentary A Place of Rage where Jordan stated that ‘ a litmus test for morality’ was ‘what you're prepared to do on behalf of the Palestinian people’ (the other being standing up for queer people). In Letter to June Jordan in September, Taffah considers Jordan’s work and the ‘life of poetry’ in a constant existence where ‘our families are hauled off to the world of the dead, and every day it is on screen.’ Yet despite the daily horrors, the world often turns a blind eye. ‘Occasionally you are permitted to speak about the dead,’ she says later in Crowdsourced on the ways media often burdens Palestinan struggles with what Edward Said describes in The Question of Palestine as ‘completely asymmetrical records of destruction’ with a ‘rhetoric of outrage’ against Palestinians contrasted with ‘the rhetoric of neutrality used to describe Israeli attacks.’ And while ‘this poem is not a passport,’ each poem transports the reader into this uncomfortable space where language is both a necessity and a weapon that can be turned against you by forces of control that will manipulate language to uphold its own destructive powers.
To Be Self-Evident
(after Edward Said)
Every empire tells its subjects a story
of revelation. The trees let down
their aging leaves, listless
in late drought. The children thrive on filtration,
their classroom air and their selfies sanitized.
Every empire seems invincible
as its borders submerge, its manicured hillsides
incinerate between guaranteed
next-day deliveries.
Every empire eulogizes
its value system, splurges
for pyrotechnics, decorates
its mausoleums for the holidays.
Every empire turns
against its colonies, cradling
the embassy’s crystal in bubble wrap,
packing extra treats for the dogs on the evacuation flight home.
Every empire promises
a revolution against itself. The children
are tasked with designing the future, growing
walls of hydroponic greens,
rebranding old protest anthems.
Every empire denies the iceberg
it crashes into, hires a chorus, funds the arts.
Every empire sings itself a lullaby.
In her article The Work of Witness, journalist Sarah Aziza asks ‘three months into a livestreamed genocide, we must ask—what does all this looking do?’ Similarly, in her poem Long Distance Tuffaha asks ‘who imagines this poem is for them?’ While these poems certainly address ongoing events that are important for the world to pay attention to, Tuffaha has spoken against the idea of being a “poet of witness,” something she finds misses the purpose for ease of fitting it into a marketing trope. ‘This book for me felt very pointedly against that posture,’ she said in an interview with the Institute for Palestine Studies, referencing fellow Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah who also decried how the term ‘binds the poet to stereotype.’ Tuffah agrees, calling it “a trap”:
‘Nothing good comes of it, and it throws you outside of your own culture, because what does that mean? To witness what you are going through? How am I witnessing it? That is a conception that is designed by a Western literary audience that has nothing to do with us. It doesn't work for me anymore. There are moments in which we witness things, but that whole framing, I can't engage with that.’
Still, much of this collection looks at how language can bind us and the importance of being heard and seen and why translation is important for this reason. ‘To translate is to believe there is a reader,’ she writes, and there is the hope we will look and listen.
‘Tonight/between translations/when we carried a poem/from one country into another language/where perhaps the imperative doesn't land/with the Same iron blow/as the original/I recounted the story of a theater of people listening to a young poet become/apocryphal/and gathering his lines/as fast as they could and then I tried/to say that the one/word he used for writing and recording/would require a sentence or a story or a pantheon/to capture it and I thought of the word/I have come to hate most in English/which is peace/because it is always pointed at my skull/and I am supposed to want/it more than my own name.’
—from Iconic
In an interview with Yale Review, Fady Joudah refers to the idea of “poet of witness” as a marketing term that earns value only if ‘empathy proves profitable’ (I wrote about this HERE). In Something About Living, Tuffaha similarly confronts the ways capitalism and the language of marketing is detrimental to language and culture by implying hierarchy ranking people by value. In her poem This Day Our Daily Bread in memory of ‘the most recent largest mass shooting’ where she quips ‘you should shelter in place / while every vote counts,’ Tuffaha employs corporate marketing language to show how it sanitizes language to both dismiss and uphold atrocities. ‘The locusts walk among us’ she warns. But there is a rather playful nature to her prose and formatting despite the heavy content, such as In Palestine There which makes playful use of the word “post” such as references to letters that tie it back to a previous poem, Envelope and ends with the line ‘once we leave a place is it there?’ Or there is the poem Slipshape which takes the form of a golden shovel on the line ‘On the brink of war, may we / remember how divine / human beings can be.’ from the poem On the Brink Of… by Suheir Hammad.
Slipshape
A hummingbird lavishes the lilac on
the first morning I am by myself and the
open window ushers in decanted perfume, sea, rain on the brink
of falling. What slipshape prayers a woman must make of
her body. To write my way out of the stories of war
I wrote the war again and again I wrote its wounds. May
arrives in a frenzy of questions. Whose children will we
lose at the border? What use is it to remember
what has never ended, to elegize how
ardently we believed? This is not who we are becomes anthem, divine
chorus, armor against the living. Our human
excesses, our florid silences, our repetitions, indelicate. Beings
so brittle any one of the next days might break us. Can
we, finally, and can we imagine what our new shapes might be?
Perhaps the most playful—and easily one of my favorites in the collection—is Beit Anya (read it HERE is really interested in language as lineage and as a site of belonging, and language as place.’ It takes its title from the former name for her father’s ancestral home meaning “House of the Poor” or “House of Affliction,” a city on the Mount of Olives occupied since the Six Day War in 1967 where Israel chopped down olive trees and intentionally ruined the crops in order to starve the people. Tuffaha contrasts this with the woes of a house of the gods and a House of unripe figs and writes ‘All language is volition, / the rising up of a body // thought lifeless’ to remind us that this was also the home to Lazarus of the Bible.
‘So little is spoken of
love and its fractured geography’
There is still plenty of love to be found within this collection amidst all the violence and destruction and family is a central theme that binds these poems much like how it binds us all together. Yet, with the generations of struggles, Palestinian diaspora and refugee status is a sad truth for many Palestinains. The poem First Generation looks at families who must decide to leave or remain, with ancestors saying ‘if we left, it was for fear / of what might fall’ but also ‘if we remained, it was for fear / of what would be taken.’ This is a struggle that is ongoing as the Israeli military continues to massacre civilians with aid from major nations like the US. During her acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Tuffaha stated:
‘I want us to feel and be uncomfortable and be disoriented and be angry and get up and demand that any administration, no matter what letter it has at the end of its name — D, R, whatever — that any administration, that we pay for, should stop funding and arming a genocide in Gaza.’
It is a lesson we should all heed and spread and reading this collection is a perfect opportunity to listen, learn and share. ‘Let the plural be / a return of us’ she writes and the gathering of people together in protest is a plea of hope.
‘Some days poems are scrawled on pieces of cardboard and carried on our shoulders at the protest like martyrs. Here I should say something about hope. Here I should say something about living.’
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something About Living is a collection certainly deserving of its accolades. Winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry and the 2024 National Book Award for poetry, this is a collection that hits hard with prose as playful as it is incisive. A haunting but necessary read, and one of the best collections I’ve read this year.
5/5
‘Let the stars fall. I have no idea
what hope is, but our people
have taught me a million ways to love.’
—from Dukka
December 2, 2024
must read collection, with a careful attendance to beauty and violence. at once a love letter to palestine and a condemnation of israel/america.
—
—
—
In Gaza, we're watching Ferguson, and in Atlanta we're watching Jerusalem watching Minneapolis watching.
—
The snipers are distracted, sexting their girlfriends. / The snipers' eyes are blinded by smoke from our burning tires. / The fence does not hold. / The snipers take a lunch break. / The bullets melt in their chambers. / The bullets disintegrate when they reach the word PRESS on Yasser's vest.
—
I belong to the road and nothing belongs to me.
—
and I thought of the word/I have come to hate most in English/which is peace/because it is always pointed at my skull/and I am supposed to want it/more than my own name.
April 11, 2024
When nothing from the past is past, when what happened then, is still happening today; when the theft of one's heritage, origins, and country has no end, and then from there, create and re-create and re-create yet again an internal space to live in, and adjust, again and again, to the physical space enough to call it a home of sorts--this is the space the poems in Something About Living move in and deeply move the reader. Stunning lines, often each its own heartbreak.
"our wounds live
freedom ammunition."
(Last two lines of the poem "Fragments from a Sudden Crescendo")
or this:
"All language is oracular--
we are forever
burnishing the wound, readying the chasm."
(Last stanza of Beit Anya)
or this:
"Let the stars fall. I have no idea
what hope is, but our people
have taught me a million ways to love."
(The last lines of the poem "Dukka" and the last lines of the collection)
"our wounds live
freedom ammunition."
(Last two lines of the poem "Fragments from a Sudden Crescendo")
or this:
"All language is oracular--
we are forever
burnishing the wound, readying the chasm."
(Last stanza of Beit Anya)
or this:
"Let the stars fall. I have no idea
what hope is, but our people
have taught me a million ways to love."
(The last lines of the poem "Dukka" and the last lines of the collection)
December 10, 2024
Well, that was incredible—I’m so glad it won the National Book Award.
December 6, 2024
This collection of poetry is absolutely heartbreaking in all the ways that it should be. Each verse strikes with an intensity that resonates deeply, leaving a lasting emotional impact. The raw and brave vulnerability of the poet creates a disturbingly immersive experience in the lives of those being aggressively oppressed
December 6, 2024
4.5/5
I love this elegant, rhythmic, and wide-ranging poetry collection that explores Palestinian history, diaspora, violence, language, love, and so much more.
Structure wise it’s not the most experimental but all the poems are quite straightforward and I could understand most of them (which is quite rare for poetry noob like me 🤓)
Here are some of my favs but honestly they’re all so good please just go read it
When The Sky Is No Longer - on the sounds you hear alive and dead from missile strikes
To Be Self-Evident - the lies that the empire tells us in exchange for our submission
This Day Our Daily Bread - on the absurdity of mass shooting frequency in America
On Translation - “To translate is to believe there is a reader.” in relations to martyrdom
Notes from the Civil Discourse Committee -“what it means for life to claim you as a vessel, for my body to become a border”
“ —I have tried "to be an American”
—It was a posture built on compliance”
Sfumato - gave me all the feels as an ESL speaker “because you speak it fluently, which is to say / without accent, / which is to say in the manner / of our most recent masters,”
Letter to June Jordan in September - our struggles are connected globally. “Some days poems are scrawled on pieces of cardboard and carried on our shoulders at the protest like martyrs. Here I should say something about hope. Here I should say something about living.”
Crowdsourced - activism - from the performative to the heartfelt “The questions about peace are delivered more artfully. / The questions about freedom rarely arrive.”
Dukka - all forms of love “I have no idea / what hope is, but our people / have taught me a million ways to love.”
I love this elegant, rhythmic, and wide-ranging poetry collection that explores Palestinian history, diaspora, violence, language, love, and so much more.
Structure wise it’s not the most experimental but all the poems are quite straightforward and I could understand most of them (which is quite rare for poetry noob like me 🤓)
Here are some of my favs but honestly they’re all so good please just go read it
When The Sky Is No Longer - on the sounds you hear alive and dead from missile strikes
To Be Self-Evident - the lies that the empire tells us in exchange for our submission
This Day Our Daily Bread - on the absurdity of mass shooting frequency in America
On Translation - “To translate is to believe there is a reader.” in relations to martyrdom
Notes from the Civil Discourse Committee -“what it means for life to claim you as a vessel, for my body to become a border”
“ —I have tried "to be an American”
—It was a posture built on compliance”
Sfumato - gave me all the feels as an ESL speaker “because you speak it fluently, which is to say / without accent, / which is to say in the manner / of our most recent masters,”
Letter to June Jordan in September - our struggles are connected globally. “Some days poems are scrawled on pieces of cardboard and carried on our shoulders at the protest like martyrs. Here I should say something about hope. Here I should say something about living.”
Crowdsourced - activism - from the performative to the heartfelt “The questions about peace are delivered more artfully. / The questions about freedom rarely arrive.”
Dukka - all forms of love “I have no idea / what hope is, but our people / have taught me a million ways to love.”
December 14, 2024
“all language is oracular - we are forever burnishing the wound, readying the chasm”
Shelved as 'read-some-poems'
October 8, 2024Sometimes mediocre poetry gets acclaim because of its timely political nature, and that's both a blessing and a curse, because these poems do little for me on an aesthetic or sensory level (I do not buy into Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's structures and her lines spiral into cliché). There is a nobility to exclaiming the resilience and suffering of Palestinians. This collection simply is not up to snuff linguistically. Even reading some of the lines quoted in other Goodreads reviews does something a touch negative to my system.
March 21, 2024
Have you ever read poetry that blows your mind & heart so wide open that you can’t string together words to express yourself? This is that kind of ethereal poetry.
This poetry collection is innovative, life giving, illuminating & so so much more.
It reads like dawa - healing, cathartic & invoking therapeutic reflection & transformation, even.
Highly recommend for 2024 poetry month book clubs, lists, events etc.
This poetry collection is innovative, life giving, illuminating & so so much more.
It reads like dawa - healing, cathartic & invoking therapeutic reflection & transformation, even.
Highly recommend for 2024 poetry month book clubs, lists, events etc.
Read
November 22, 2024“You note the bleakness of your own heart wanting to live in spite of this”
November 8, 2024
Solid, if a little worn. Last National Book Award Poetry finalist, ranking below. Any of the top 4 would be a good winner.
1. Modern Poetry
2. [...]
3. Mother
4. Something About Living
5. Wrong Norma
1. Modern Poetry
2. [...]
3. Mother
4. Something About Living
5. Wrong Norma
December 9, 2024
Winner of the 2024 National Book Award ("NBA") for Poetry, this awesome little book explores the life of the poet from two (2) extremes: the first growing up Arabic in Gaza, Lebanon and Jordan as a "stranger" in her own land; the second living contently in a country that gives lip service to the generational genocide in the poet's home countries. The adversary is never identified as the Israeli Defense Force ("IDF"), but you know what it is. The adversary is also a metaphor for death that makes "Something about Living" so incredibly special. Moments of love and living to one's fullest.
Does this book deserve the acclaim it garnered in 2024? Yes, but so does "Modern Poetry: Poems" by Diane Seuss and "Wrong Norma" by Anne Carson. The state of poetry and literature in the world is exceptionally good right now. Unfortunately, it takes a war of attrition to make it so.
It's a GREAT reading life with poets like Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Diane Seuss and Anne Carson in it. Rock on mis Amigas & mes Amigos!
Does this book deserve the acclaim it garnered in 2024? Yes, but so does "Modern Poetry: Poems" by Diane Seuss and "Wrong Norma" by Anne Carson. The state of poetry and literature in the world is exceptionally good right now. Unfortunately, it takes a war of attrition to make it so.
It's a GREAT reading life with poets like Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Diane Seuss and Anne Carson in it. Rock on mis Amigas & mes Amigos!
December 3, 2024
“I thought of the word / I have come to hate most in English / which is peace / because it is always pointed at my skull / and I am supposed to want / it more than my own name.”
Personally, didn’t enjoy this poetry collection as much ‘Water & Salt’…
Personally, didn’t enjoy this poetry collection as much ‘Water & Salt’…
December 3, 2024
The best of these poems are at once radiant and shattering.
December 4, 2024
very sad and beautiful
November 29, 2024
Beautiful. Devastating.
December 25, 2024
Let the stars fall. I have no idea what hope is, but our people have taught me a million ways to love.
Museumed graves intone a call to prayer for the living.
So little is spoken of love and its fractured geography.
This was the 2024 winner of the National Book award, and the poet treads the lines of the diaspora and the country of birth, and her poetry is powerful, beautiful, as witness and experiencer both. My heart breaks daily for the idea of the Middle East in the history of the world, such beauty and advances, such innovations and art that is being lost, overwritten by the changes wrought by humans, mostly men, mostly power hungry men. I always am inspired for those who hope and work for change, and these poems are their song.
TRANSIT A hoopoe leaves a feather on the cusp of a hillside, a temple I’ve chosen of unremarkable rock, its particular cradle of light. Mine is a story of never being able to stay long enough to be known, of noticing
all the smallest relics. In the rock’s shadow a cluster of wild cyclamen, or what could be geraniums, what might be foraged for sustenance, what might be pressed for keeping.
PORTRAITS OF LIGHT
The light is a molten weight, a mountain of thirst. Of the old stones of their houses, it makes an ocean, azure dissolving into distance. And they are a chiaroscuro huddled on the arthritic bridge, bodies scant as bedclothes, damp and wrinkled in the throes of nightmare,
Bespectacled experts survey the patterns in prayer beads for signs of structural damage, of impending collapse. There is no wind to carry omens through the window. It hasn’t rained in years and the locusts walk among us, sunlight ricocheting off their medals.
BEIT ANYA
All language is oracular— we are forever burnishing the wound, readying the chasm.
DIALOGIC However broken the sentences you believe them preferable to silence
WHEN THE SKY IS NO LONGER a womb, prayers now besieged inside your throat hum over whistles and shrieks—the long howl puncturing what was. Silence is the first casualty.
You note the bleakness of your own heart wanting to live in spite of this.
FRAGMENTS FROM A SUDDEN CRESCENDO
Gates crenelated, sky widening, sultans stir in their sleep, offer archways to lift nightmares from their brows. Museumed graves intone a call to prayer for the living. We perform our ablutions in tear gas our limbs stun our hearts grenade our wounds live freedom ammunition.
THREADS
You cannot swallow a life this large, the bones no longer tender, the body reordered by what it carried.
FIRST GENERATION
Our parents told us: if we left, it was for fear of what might fall, the structures that house us, the sky itself, breeched, defenseless. And if we remained, it was for fear of what would be taken, the orchards that raised us, the catalog of wildflowers we foraged after the last rains, the names inscribed on grandparents’ headstones. So little is spoken of
love and its fractured geography. Like all good refugees, our parents teach us remembering how it is forgetting’s successful twin, how it graduates from the best university, makes a life for itself in tech and finance, in arts and letters, and when our fingers part to examine it, what we’ve gripped like the edge of a lifeboat
TO BE SELF-EVIDENT
Every empire promises a revolution against itself. The children are tasked with designing the future, growing walls of hydroponic greens, rebranding old protest anthems. Every empire denies the iceberg it crashes into, hires a chorus, funds the arts. Every empire sings itself a lullaby.
THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD on the most recent largest mass shooting Today you saved on investing, and the side effects may include fever dizziness shortness of breath you should lie down and find out what your sleep number is you should shelter in place while every vote counts. Today is paid for by the people. Relief is slow when you are an island and the death toll, like the hurricane count, is rising, but most of these claims have not been verified. Today is an offering that can be redeemed at participating locations while supplies last, though reports indicate
the gunman worked tirelessly. Today was confirmed by multiple sources and thoughts and prayers have been filed. Today is an exclusive report we learned about while getting the tough stains out. Ranking members had no comment but the pastor at the crime scene said: “I do not understand, but I know my god does.”
In 1998, as Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank and Gaza accelerated, American luxury brand magazines featured an advertisement for tourism in Israel with the slogan “No one belongs here more than you do.”
TRIPTYCH UNDER APPROPRIATE AUSPICES No one belongs here more than you do shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. Every no one belongs here more than you do has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. No distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional, or international status of the country or territory to which a person no one belongs here more than you do.
EROSION No one belongs here more than you do No one belongs here more than you do No one belongs here more than you do No one belongs here more than you No one belongs here more than you No one belongs here more than you No one belongs here more than No one belongs here more No one belongs here No one belongs here No one belongs No one belongs No one be No one
ICONIC
thought of the word/I have come to hate most in English/which is peace/because it is always pointed at my skull/and I am supposed to want/it more than my own name.
AUTOCORRECT Texting you about floodplains in the ancient world and alluvial transforms into I loved.
Let the stars fall. I have no idea what hope is, but our people have taught me a million ways to love.
Museumed graves intone a call to prayer for the living.
So little is spoken of love and its fractured geography.
This was the 2024 winner of the National Book award, and the poet treads the lines of the diaspora and the country of birth, and her poetry is powerful, beautiful, as witness and experiencer both. My heart breaks daily for the idea of the Middle East in the history of the world, such beauty and advances, such innovations and art that is being lost, overwritten by the changes wrought by humans, mostly men, mostly power hungry men. I always am inspired for those who hope and work for change, and these poems are their song.
TRANSIT A hoopoe leaves a feather on the cusp of a hillside, a temple I’ve chosen of unremarkable rock, its particular cradle of light. Mine is a story of never being able to stay long enough to be known, of noticing
all the smallest relics. In the rock’s shadow a cluster of wild cyclamen, or what could be geraniums, what might be foraged for sustenance, what might be pressed for keeping.
PORTRAITS OF LIGHT
The light is a molten weight, a mountain of thirst. Of the old stones of their houses, it makes an ocean, azure dissolving into distance. And they are a chiaroscuro huddled on the arthritic bridge, bodies scant as bedclothes, damp and wrinkled in the throes of nightmare,
Bespectacled experts survey the patterns in prayer beads for signs of structural damage, of impending collapse. There is no wind to carry omens through the window. It hasn’t rained in years and the locusts walk among us, sunlight ricocheting off their medals.
BEIT ANYA
All language is oracular— we are forever burnishing the wound, readying the chasm.
DIALOGIC However broken the sentences you believe them preferable to silence
WHEN THE SKY IS NO LONGER a womb, prayers now besieged inside your throat hum over whistles and shrieks—the long howl puncturing what was. Silence is the first casualty.
You note the bleakness of your own heart wanting to live in spite of this.
FRAGMENTS FROM A SUDDEN CRESCENDO
Gates crenelated, sky widening, sultans stir in their sleep, offer archways to lift nightmares from their brows. Museumed graves intone a call to prayer for the living. We perform our ablutions in tear gas our limbs stun our hearts grenade our wounds live freedom ammunition.
THREADS
You cannot swallow a life this large, the bones no longer tender, the body reordered by what it carried.
FIRST GENERATION
Our parents told us: if we left, it was for fear of what might fall, the structures that house us, the sky itself, breeched, defenseless. And if we remained, it was for fear of what would be taken, the orchards that raised us, the catalog of wildflowers we foraged after the last rains, the names inscribed on grandparents’ headstones. So little is spoken of
love and its fractured geography. Like all good refugees, our parents teach us remembering how it is forgetting’s successful twin, how it graduates from the best university, makes a life for itself in tech and finance, in arts and letters, and when our fingers part to examine it, what we’ve gripped like the edge of a lifeboat
TO BE SELF-EVIDENT
Every empire promises a revolution against itself. The children are tasked with designing the future, growing walls of hydroponic greens, rebranding old protest anthems. Every empire denies the iceberg it crashes into, hires a chorus, funds the arts. Every empire sings itself a lullaby.
THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD on the most recent largest mass shooting Today you saved on investing, and the side effects may include fever dizziness shortness of breath you should lie down and find out what your sleep number is you should shelter in place while every vote counts. Today is paid for by the people. Relief is slow when you are an island and the death toll, like the hurricane count, is rising, but most of these claims have not been verified. Today is an offering that can be redeemed at participating locations while supplies last, though reports indicate
the gunman worked tirelessly. Today was confirmed by multiple sources and thoughts and prayers have been filed. Today is an exclusive report we learned about while getting the tough stains out. Ranking members had no comment but the pastor at the crime scene said: “I do not understand, but I know my god does.”
In 1998, as Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank and Gaza accelerated, American luxury brand magazines featured an advertisement for tourism in Israel with the slogan “No one belongs here more than you do.”
TRIPTYCH UNDER APPROPRIATE AUSPICES No one belongs here more than you do shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. Every no one belongs here more than you do has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. No distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional, or international status of the country or territory to which a person no one belongs here more than you do.
EROSION No one belongs here more than you do No one belongs here more than you do No one belongs here more than you do No one belongs here more than you No one belongs here more than you No one belongs here more than you No one belongs here more than No one belongs here more No one belongs here No one belongs here No one belongs No one belongs No one be No one
ICONIC
thought of the word/I have come to hate most in English/which is peace/because it is always pointed at my skull/and I am supposed to want/it more than my own name.
AUTOCORRECT Texting you about floodplains in the ancient world and alluvial transforms into I loved.
Let the stars fall. I have no idea what hope is, but our people have taught me a million ways to love.
September 16, 2024
I loved this author's collection "Water & Salt" which made my top books of 2023. I didn't realize she had another collection until the National Book Awards Longlist for Poetry came out. So, thank you, NBA. I'm so glad I learned about this collection and that I read it.
Again, Khalaf Tuffaha tells both stories of Palestine and of America. The diaspora is present in her poetry. She speaks both of the violence against Palestinians and against her new home in America - the poem written after another American mass shooting cracked me right open. An exquisite collection.
Again, Khalaf Tuffaha tells both stories of Palestine and of America. The diaspora is present in her poetry. She speaks both of the violence against Palestinians and against her new home in America - the poem written after another American mass shooting cracked me right open. An exquisite collection.
August 31, 2024
absolutely heartbreaking in all the ways that it should be. poetry like this makes me feel really feel and i’m so thankful for people sharing their hurt and their beauty on a page with me.
need to go back and read and reread this. underline the words that really captivated me. thank you tina for knowing i needed this while on tour.
need to go back and read and reread this. underline the words that really captivated me. thank you tina for knowing i needed this while on tour.
September 29, 2024
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha strikes again what an amazing poetry collection!!!!
There's so many poems that struck me to my core, special shout-out to iconic.
There's so many poems that struck me to my core, special shout-out to iconic.
December 29, 2024
Every empire tells its subjects a story
of revelation. The trees let down
their aging leaves, listless
in late drought. The children thrive on filtration,
their classroom air and their selfies sanitized.
Every empire seems invincible
as its borders submerge, its manicured hillsides
incinerate between guaranteed
next-day deliveries.
Every empire eulogizes
its value system, splurges
for pyrotechnics, decorates
its mausoleums for the holidays.
Every empire turns
against its colonies, cradling
the embassy’s crystal in bubble wrap,
packing extra treats for the dogs on the evacuation flight home.
Every empire promises
a revolution against itself. The children
are tasked with designing the future, growing
walls of hydroponic greens,
rebranding old protest anthems.
Every empire denies the iceberg
it crashes into, hires a chorus, funds the arts.
Every empire sings itself a lullaby.
----------------------------------
-Lena Khalal Tuffaha, "To Be Self-Evident"
dedication: "After Edward Said"
Something About Living ** National Book Award in Poetry (2024) ** Read in Dubai, Bahrai, and Saudi Arabia (Nov-Dec 2024)
of revelation. The trees let down
their aging leaves, listless
in late drought. The children thrive on filtration,
their classroom air and their selfies sanitized.
Every empire seems invincible
as its borders submerge, its manicured hillsides
incinerate between guaranteed
next-day deliveries.
Every empire eulogizes
its value system, splurges
for pyrotechnics, decorates
its mausoleums for the holidays.
Every empire turns
against its colonies, cradling
the embassy’s crystal in bubble wrap,
packing extra treats for the dogs on the evacuation flight home.
Every empire promises
a revolution against itself. The children
are tasked with designing the future, growing
walls of hydroponic greens,
rebranding old protest anthems.
Every empire denies the iceberg
it crashes into, hires a chorus, funds the arts.
Every empire sings itself a lullaby.
----------------------------------
-Lena Khalal Tuffaha, "To Be Self-Evident"
dedication: "After Edward Said"
Something About Living ** National Book Award in Poetry (2024) ** Read in Dubai, Bahrai, and Saudi Arabia (Nov-Dec 2024)
December 21, 2024
I was deeply moved and disturbed by the gorgeous and brutal prose of Lena Khalaf Tuffaha in her poetry collection Something About Living. The suffering and hope of the Palestinian people is captured in beautiful, heartbreaking, and fierce images that had me gasping. My favorite lines: “salt like shards on parched lips is gentler than the sulfur of prayer - the dry scorch of waiting for mercy.” There were so many powerful images like this.
My favorite poem was Zaghareed, describing a woman learning to ululate as a girl and using it throughout the occasions in her life of death and celebration. The image of “stand-in mothers” joyfully and spontaneously sending off a young motherless bride will stay with me.
My favorite poem was Zaghareed, describing a woman learning to ululate as a girl and using it throughout the occasions in her life of death and celebration. The image of “stand-in mothers” joyfully and spontaneously sending off a young motherless bride will stay with me.
April 30, 2024
"In the mirror of my heart you can find no shelter.
One woman loses 15 maybe 20 members of her family, one garden at a time.
I belong to the road and nothing belongs to me.
Out here, eyes find the edge that isn't one.
I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee,
stronger than memory, and sadder than sadness.
We are all waiting for you, you who have come so far.
Do not underestimate this rubble." - Reclamation Cento
One woman loses 15 maybe 20 members of her family, one garden at a time.
I belong to the road and nothing belongs to me.
Out here, eyes find the edge that isn't one.
I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee,
stronger than memory, and sadder than sadness.
We are all waiting for you, you who have come so far.
Do not underestimate this rubble." - Reclamation Cento
December 4, 2024
3.5
#ReadPalestineWeek
"She asked if we could talk about the life of poetry. Our families are hauled off to the world of the dead, and every day it is on screen. In Gaza, we're watching Ferguson, and in Atlanta we're watching Jerusalem watching Minneapolis watching.... Some days, poems are scrawled on pieces of cardboard and carried on our shoulders at the protest like martyrs. Here I should say something about hope. Here I should say something about living" (pg 61).
#ReadPalestineWeek
"She asked if we could talk about the life of poetry. Our families are hauled off to the world of the dead, and every day it is on screen. In Gaza, we're watching Ferguson, and in Atlanta we're watching Jerusalem watching Minneapolis watching.... Some days, poems are scrawled on pieces of cardboard and carried on our shoulders at the protest like martyrs. Here I should say something about hope. Here I should say something about living" (pg 61).
January 1, 2025
MUST READ!
I need a hard copy of this, I can’t find it anywhere :(
Absolutely beautiful and devastating read. This is something I’m going to have to read again and again. It’s the first time I’ve read poetry, and I think I need to read it a couple of times to take it all in bit by bit.
Free Palestine, may isnotreal burn down and cease to exist in 2025! 🇵🇸
I need a hard copy of this, I can’t find it anywhere :(
Absolutely beautiful and devastating read. This is something I’m going to have to read again and again. It’s the first time I’ve read poetry, and I think I need to read it a couple of times to take it all in bit by bit.
Free Palestine, may isnotreal burn down and cease to exist in 2025! 🇵🇸
December 29, 2024
I loved and was deeply moved by several poems in this collection, but if I’m choosing one book of poetry to recommend about Palestine, my personal opinion is that […]: Poems packs more of a punch. I guess I differ from the NBA judges in that.
December 30, 2024
Powerful book of poetry:
"Even on nights when/ there is no anchor, the brine/of a dream consumed/by the sea, salt like shards/on parched lips is gentler/than the sulfur of prayer—/the dry scorch of waiting for mercy"
"Even on nights when/ there is no anchor, the brine/of a dream consumed/by the sea, salt like shards/on parched lips is gentler/than the sulfur of prayer—/the dry scorch of waiting for mercy"
January 10, 2025
Heartbreaking POV of people living in Gaza, sometimes edging into the resentment of the unfairness and oppression they experience. I found the book a bit disjointed in its presentation, though still powerful in moments. Worth the read.
December 16, 2024
A beautiful meditation on home and exile.
Read
January 11, 2025Notables 2024 #165
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