Announcing the Winner of the 2021 Goldstein Prize: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha – Michigan Quarterly Review

Announcing the Winner of the 2021 Goldstein Prize: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Sumita Chakraborty has selected Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem “Autocorrect” as the winner of the 2021 Goldstein Poetry Prize. The poem will appear in MQR‘s Summer 2022 issue.

“What I love about “Autocorrect” is that its language games cut straight to the poem’s emotional stakes from the very beginning. Alluvial—a word that describes land created by the deposit of sediment over time—becomes I love, and the speaker’s love in turn itself accumulates line by line, metaphor by metaphor, word by word, until the very last line of the poem, in which both of these words meet again in “the earth of ancestry.” Each transmogrification of each word, whether technologically inspired or not, ripples through the poem and gains meaning as it moves. And as much as the poem is generous enough to give its readers, it also tells us what we cannot have: “I text about what I long for,” says the speaker before telling us that her “longings // are only publishable as anti-pastorals,” reminding us of the gulf between what we might presume to know and the speaker’s deeply held truths, making the poem a kind of “digital synecdoche” of itself, like the poem’s “you,” like the poem’s “I,” and like us, the poem’s readers, asking ourselves what we know of time, what we long for, and where, for us, our terra rosa becomes terror. ”

-Sumita Chakraborty


Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first book, Water & Salt (Red Hen Press) won the 2018 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. Her first chapbook, Arab in Newsland, won the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Prize. Her chapbook, Letters from the Interior, (Diode 2019), is a finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.

Learn more about the prize here.

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