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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