Kaan and Her Sisters

In this imaginative and searching collection, Tuffaha (Water and Salt) weaves intergenerational memory into a beautiful, haunting, and intimate portrait of survival that serves as a critique of violence. In one poem, Tuffaha uses the phrase “imagined geography,” which is, in turn, an apt description for how her writing transcends time and place. Centered on an Arabic teacher, Miss Sahar, who “taught us poetry, a vessel/ made of the ocean it traveled,” these poems offer “a new grammar for this country.” There are powerful images throughout (“I strung my tears like pearls on silk thread”) as Tuffaha meditates on the juxtaposition of happiness (“Happiness is land/ where no one thirsts”) and grief (“To grieve is to relinquish the child who travels”). As such, these poems reveal what is lost when families are displaced and tragedy becomes all too common. They also serve as a testament to what is possible through the love of those same families, and through the ordinary will to remember: “I know the few letters needed for understanding.” Tuffaha depicts the world in all its pain and possibility. (July)