Michigan Quarterly Review congratulates Lena Khalaf Tuffaha on her remarkable achievement of winning a National Book Award in Poetry for her collection, Something About Living. We are honored to have published Tuffaha in our most recent Fall Translation Issue for her translation of poems by Zakaria Mohammed. Tuffaha was the 2021 Goldstein Poetry Prize winner for her poem “Autocorrect,” published in MQR’s Summer 2022 Issue. She is featured in our Spring 2018 issue as well. Read her poems below:
AUTOCORRECT
Texting you about floodplains
in the ancient world and alluvial
transforms into I loved. Your name
cannot stand on its own, predictive
text attaches -esque, refashions you
into a quality of yourself, digital
synecdoche. One of my children’s names only
appears in ALL CAPS no matter my attempts to save her
in my dictionary; the quietest squalling across the screen.
How do we decide where the ancient begins?
The end of the century in which we came of age
is a rift valley, our memories dropping steeply
at the margins. To describe it to my children I say: there was
no way to reach us if we wandered. No monuments
of our days until the film was developed.
What we knew of time was organized on notecards
in narrow wooden drawers, and we had to take
the bus and walk up several flights of stairs to search it. I text
about what I long for and cannot reach
this year, no nation, just sunlight
on striated hillsides in early spring, and terra rossa becomes terror.
Do you think the agents assigned to us wear
trench coats and dark sunglasses? Do they write
their reports about us in invisible ink? In ancient times,
the floodplain of the Jordan was covered
in reeds, tamarisk, and willows.
I regret mentioning the tamarisk, how
it ushers in multiple congregations,
concertina wire. How my longings
are only publishable as anti-pastorals,
refined alterations of a text that contend,
collapse. My poem was in that first revelation,
the text confiding that what endures
of the alluvial plain, the earth of ancestry, is love.
Winner of the 2021 Goldstein Poetry Prize, Summer 2022 Issue
LESSON: PAST, INCOMPLETE
The voice of the past
is an incomplete verb
The song of the past
is in search of a subject
The sound of the past
is a sister’s lament
How do these sisters cross-stitch our story?
Kaan and most often there was
There was upon makaan
How can we recount what is past?
Let makaan cool to ashes
and let a morning lift us into the telling
what is a past without a people
to look back on it?
For Kaan to speak
Saar must usher us
to a new country
and we’ll conjure the song the voice the sound
Spring 2018 Issue
NOTES ON THE NATURE AND IMPLICATIONS OF KAAN
Spring 2018 Issue
LESSON: DIRECT OBJECTS
Spring 2018 Issue
KAAN’S SISTER SAAR
No one takes this sister
seriously. With her simple name,
its single unassuming
syllable, no wonder people forget
or walk around as if they had forgotten.
All day long she’s grasping
at stones and chasing after checkpoints but
who heeds the warnings of a one-note Cassandra?
Kaan assures her it’s only a matter of time
delay, the people reach the words
long after they’ve been architected, they
arrive at the conclusion eventually
at funerals or in history classes.
No help to Saar, hostage to this family
of the past though she foretells
what will survive, who we mourn.
Spring 2018 Issue
KAAN AND HER SISTER RETURN
Kaan likes to tell stories
but stories need a place upon time
and all we have are thorn-bush roads
we cannot cross and candles melting
inside our coffee cups. Fortunes
in cardamom dregs and brittle pages,
a shroud of dust reclaiming our language.
Kaan looks over her shoulder,
tastes the sea on her tongue,
recognizes the fragrance of oranges.
Kaan circles the city in search of streets renamed.
Her sisters ask about the old tailor’s shop, the bakery,
the painter’s loft above the fractured waves.
Fish fry in rancid oil where a saint
once upon this place intoned a seaside supplication.
The domed roof of this restaurant is not
an aesthetic choice. The charming, the cobblestone,
the archway are not artifacts. The foundations
of stolen houses are not fossils.
Kaan stumbles upon her dishes
at an antique shop. Saar notices her laundry
suspended from the ceiling of an art gallery.
How to use language in this new-time story
of unhoused objects
of white-washed words?
Even where rooms are no longer
upon this place Kaan senses the breath
of what is beneath her feet.
Saar stands alongside her,
insists we are not salt, have not dissolved.
Kaan and her sisters are incomplete verbs.
One of their sisters is named Remains.
Spring 2018 Issue
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist and translator. She is the author of Water & Salt (Red Hen), which won the 2018 Washington State Book Award, Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), and Something About Living (UAkron, 2024), winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. Her writing has been published in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, the Nation, Poets.org, Protean, and Prairie Schooner. and in anthologies including The Long Devotion and We Call to the Eye and the Night. She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series “Poems from Palestine” at the Baffler magazine. She is currently curating a series on Palestinian writers for Words Without Borders entitled Against Silence.
