Lena Khalaf Tuffaha — Dukka
2/23/202616 min
Loving in the face of violence, danger, and distress is an act of defiance, as demonstrated in Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s achingly beautiful poem “Dukka”. The Palestinian American writer spotlights seven aspects of love in action — between father and newborn, for example, a journalist and her audience, a pair of intimates dining out. She shows us the “million ways to love” flowing through her community and cascading through generations, centuries, millennia, as inexorable and constant as the ocean and as bright and surprising as a rare meteor shower.
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Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (The University of Akron Press, 2024), winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize; Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award; and Water & Salt (Red Hen Press), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention of the 2018 Arab American Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, and Letters from the Interior, finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsPádraig Ó Tuama· Host0:02
My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and once when I was at a book event in Dublin, I asked people to call out a line of poetry that they'd remembered from school, and somebody called something out from Yeats, and somebody called something out from Nolan Ni Ghornal, and, um, then somebody shouted out, "Hope's the thing with feathers," and people kind of made noises of recognition of all of those poems. And then right after somebody said, "Hope's the thing with feathers," somebody, quick as anything, said, um, "I don't know about feathers, but it's certainly got claws," which got a great response. I thought it was magnificent. Best part of the night. And I loved that quip because it was so fast and so witty, and also it introduced some challenge to the lines of Emily Dickinson because we'd gone from talking about lines of poetry and reciting them to thinking about the content of that. And I loved the engagement with content, not just recitation, not just the art of the art, but also looking at what the art is pointing you towards. It's also got claws. Duqqa by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. At the restaurant, the loudest sound is the ocean a few blocks away. A meteor shower is forecast, a once-in-a-lifetime event, but the freeway flush with headlights precludes us from viewing. The stars fall silently