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About Water & Salt
Product Description Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's debut, Water & Salt, sings in the voices of people ravaged by cycles of war and news coverage. These poems alternately rage, laugh, celebrate and grieve, singing in the voices of people ravaged by cycles of war and news coverage and inviting the reader to see the human lives lived beyond the headlines. Review “Aside from wheat, essential ingredients for making bread are water and salt. And in Lena Tuffaha’s luminous poems, she provides the necessary words to feed our humanity. The poems in Water & Salt are fearless and frank. They speak of a place where a phone call announces doom and where ‘portraits find their frames.’ But always, despite the violence and war, in the music of Tuffaha’s poetry there is a clear summons, beckoning us to join in the feast of her language. These are poems that rise, surge, and stir us.” ―Oliver de La Paz, author of Requiem for the Orchard “Arab-American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poems are both mirror and zaatar, sharing a clear-eyed picture of our sometimes-brutal world―as in the acid clarity of her ‘Running Orders’―and also feeding us from the harvest of possibility: “the song of zaatar simmering / in its native oil rises up / and time evaporates.’ Her auspicious debut Water & Salt, named after the primal ingredients for slaking our thirst and satisfying our tongues, carries with it the aching wisdom of immigrants and mothers, whose lives are fraught with departure and carved by longing. Yet she turns the ominous language of border control into the tender music of trochaic hexameter: ‘You will need to state the reason for your visit,’ and encourages us travelers that ‘the story / is still being written and / our fractures aren’t done setting.’” ―Philip Metres, author of A Concordance of Leaves, winner of the Arab American Book Award About the Author Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet of Palestinian, Jordanian and Syrian heritage. Her poems have been published in American and international journals including Blackbird, The Boiler, Borderlands Texas Review, The Indianola Review, James Franco Review, The Lake for Poetry, Lunch Ticket, Mizna, The Ofi Press Mexico, Sukoon, and the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art. Several of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, “Immigrant” in 2015 and for “Middle Village” and “Ruin” in 2016. She is an MFA candidate at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Redmond, Washington, with her family. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Tu’burni “Tu’burni” is a common Syrian term of endearment that translates as “bury me” and means “I love you so much I hope I’m the one that dies first.” As a child, the syrup of my grandmother’s lilting sweet nothings seemed otherworldly. Her Syrian phrases stretched wide as an embrace, jasmine petals bathed in her laughter. Tu’burni―bury me! Beloved of my heart my life and my soul. When I balked at the dark prayer wrapped in love’s silks my mother translated: Let me be the one who goes first, let my heart never live a day without you, children should bury their elders. In my grandmother’s old Damascus neighborhood, slender-limbed boys and girls scrubbed clean of war’s detritus sleep soundlessly in shrouds against the stone wall of a schoolroom. The dark prayer, unanswered, burns to white ash. In the homeland of jasmine, childhood drowned in a poison with no fragrance.
