Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Something About Living
    Something About Living
    Something About Living
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Something About Living

    By Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry
    Winner of the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize

    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 fracturing: 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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe University Of Akron Press
    Release dateApr 2, 2024
    ISBN9781629222752
    Something About Living
    Author

    Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

    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 more from Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

    Related to Something About Living

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Plague Octets

      May 1, 2022

      The wolf plans to live with the lamb, the leopardto lie with the goat. It’s written in stoneand onion skin. The lion will eat straw,the snake will eat dust. It’s prophesiedin ball point on the palm of your hand.The date has been fixed for the wedding

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      The painting is of a door, its wood so warpedwith moisture it cannot close. It stays ajar leaving a sliver of light—enough to suggestsomething sweet and almost unreachable behind the door—and you sit in yourroom working on the bills or those comforti

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Devil Asks Why You Would Mouth The Word Pity

      Jul 1, 2022

      even in this abundance of dark? Even in this abundance of dark you have totake the stars on faith. Look: Under today’s dim sky there is a basket.In that basket there is a fish. Come night, you are the animal that will eat the best parts of it. And ye

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Rot

      Sep 2, 2022

      Rot
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      All I Know

      Jul 1, 2022

      The Statue of Liberty was packed in crates of lentilsand there is a species of catfish with scalesso tough that piranhas can’t chew throughto red softness. I’m thinking of what is vital,today. The willow tree in my dreams that swaysand a little girl

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      TEN POEMS Translations of Rafael Alberti

      May 1, 2024

      Throughout the centuries,through the nothingness of the world,I, without sleep, search for you. Behind me, imperceptible,without touching my shoulders,my dead angel keeps watch. Where is Paradise,Shadow, you who have been there?I ask silently. Cities

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      People let themselves down so hard they took to clappingwhen the plane lands. Sometimes even at the creditsof a movie. Their funerals turned out to be for the livingall along. You wouldn’t know how much they hatedcrowded trains by the way they kept b

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Diaspora Sonnets

      Sep 1, 2022

      The old men drink their spritzers and gossipunder awnings. Red hued and blustery, like two roosters on the side of a road.Skyward they crane their necks and laugh, sometimes they wonder about kings and future kingsand how the muscles peer from their

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Bless Your Soup

      Jan 1, 2022

      I am doing the work of healing.As in:I cry to early-2000s Paula DeAnda.I wash the towels from our apartment.I find your resume onlineand critique it harshly for a ghost audience. I come up with new names for emotions, likeDISLODGED FITTED SHEET orDAM

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      cook lobster. They’re loyal sea rubies and deservebetter than a pinch of lemon and herbed butter. But I’ll shower hot enough to brighten you, makezinnias of your shoulders and steal the towels when it’s over, your water-tattooed back a garden before

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2024

      I can’t understand, after years of reading, the relevanceof metaphysics. How does it account for the wants of my mind breaking apart my body? I prefer to think of poppies,the variety fated to bloom blood-red. Or, of planting poppies, any flowers in t

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      for Brenda Shaughnessy The news isn’t good, and neither of us feelslike pretending, though the list of what we hope forgrows longer by the day. More news, goodor otherwise, everything witnessed by the lightof fires, and something we cherished alwaysb

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Something About John Coltrane

      Sep 1, 2021

      Something about a tree in shallow sleepListening for what it wants to remember: The note of a seed, its neck sliding throughDirt and its confusion—nothing cleansed Of struggle. The weight lost after death,A confrontation of death. John Coltrane Even

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      She was a security guard and even though her uniform was black I could seeIt was covered in blood, the marble floor was covered in blood, it wasSlowly pooling out from the space where HER HAND used to beOh my god, I said, then I started to say, YOUR

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      I’ve seen enough films where a character nickshimself shaving or maybe has a bread knife slip and the thinrun of blood is supposed to stand for some violence,for something he did and is desperateto cover up, but the truth will out—I’ve seen enough th

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Some Of The Men We Love Are Terrorists

      Jan 1, 2022

      & honestly, i have no solutions—our world a mad swarm of bees. forgive me my own devotion, the handsome clench. my first love masters a sinister arithmetic; his patrilineage swelling like a heavy god between his legs. i’m well-conditioned, my hands a

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      On Mary Oliver and Resisting Poems of Gladness

      Jan 22, 2019

      Was it possible that, despite my best efforts to resist proscriptive poetry doctrines, somewhere along the line I’d internalized the unspoken tenet that accessible poems of praise and wonder are less worthy of real attention? The post On Mary Oliver

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      nothing so lonely as the hospitalbed. nothing so lonely as beinglonely in the hospital bed. nothingso jargoned as the body sproutingbrush tuber cannula or rue. nothingso pure as the abstracted by which Imean exploded body, the body thatholds its skin

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      When making an axe handlethe pattern is not far off. —Gary Snyder My mother was either horizontal on the couch,or vertical, a plumb line from her spineto the top of her head to the ceiling that spinswhen she drinks, alcohol and an air bubbletrapped,

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      May 1, 2023

      Let’s be GodFor a moment, Shall we?That which invites Composition,That which is suspended From a great height,The presence Of approximationHeavy in the meadows, I’m not afraid,And yet My shroud vanishesIn these lines, I am so weptPast weeping, And wh

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2022

      A prayer begins & endseach meeting, it starts with the word God& ends with the word difference. The difference, as far as I can tell,between what is offered & what is possible is a chasm. At times it seemswe simply run out of places to be, until we c

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Poetry Of Perseverance

      Aug 15, 2018

      The Poetry Of Perseverance
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What Form Can Hold

      Jan 1, 2024

      If poetry is, at least in part, a quest for form, then form is a poem’s architecture. The words of a poem may be its raw materials—the wood, the stone, the glass—but form is the magic that makes it possible to enter inside those word shelters, to fin

      13 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Younger Than War

      Nov 9, 2023

      Younger Than War
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      There are not enough hours in the day before I have to perform affection. That’s an objectively robotic thing to say, my therapist tells me, when I speakabout my responses to sentimentality. My weekly battle with the laser printer—a kind of intimacy,

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Something About Living

    5/5

    1 rating1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Thank You This Is Very Good, Maybe This Can Help You
      Download Full Ebook Very Detail Here :
      https://amzn.to/3XOf46C
      - You Can See Full Book/ebook Offline Any Time
      - You Can Read All Important Knowledge Here
      - You Can Become A Master In Your Business

    Book preview

    Something About Living - Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

    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.

    I.

    Each Palestinian structure presents itself as a potential ruin

    —Edward Said

    Variations on a Last Chance

    The fence does not hold.

    The wire sheds its barbs, softens to silk thread.

    The snipers run out of bullets.

    The desert, as it always has, of its volition, blooms.

    The snipers are distracted, sexting their girlfriends.

    The snipers’ eyes are blinded by smoke from our burning tires.

    The snipers wonder if they will ever see the end of us.

    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.

    The news finally breaks the stillness around us.

    The bullets will themselves away from the boy’s skull.

    The boy’s sandals sprout wings and he hovers above the bullets’ path.

    The snipers lose interest in shooting at medics evacuating the wounded.

    The snipers make eye contact with one of us and see.

    There are enough saline bags at the hospital.

    The snipers shoot and miss and miss and miss.

    We outrun the snipers.

    We bury the dead at the fence, let their roots reach the other side of home.

    Portraits of Light

    Then

    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, bodies trudging

    in low relief against limestone.

    Who spoke first as they walked? Did the boy

    in slippers shuffle ahead asking

    after his bicycle? Did the old man mutter

    end-of-days verses between sobs? The sun scores

    tender scalps, inscribes legends on a map of loss.

    Now

    The light is damask draped on the clothesline.

    Tea glasses touch with castanet swiftness, a mint haze

    floats over the women’s words. The gate groans

    open and the music of slender heels on tiles ushers in the evening.

    Tea darkens in the pot as cicadas prepare

    their supplications, mosquitos ready for their night raids.

    One of the women slides the deck out of its box, halves it,

    begins to deal. Another reaches for her monogrammed lighter,

    their laughter a rustle of curtains drawn.

    String-of-pearl smiles enrobed in scarlet give way

    to cigarette kisses. Smoke undulates, threads

    between soft curls and crepe collars.

    Manicured fingers wave fans of kings and queens.

    Later

    The light is irrelevant, though it fills quiet rooms of

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1