Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award for Poetry
Available from Trio House Press
​Kaan and Her Sisters | Titles (triohousepress.org)

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Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's Kaan and Her Sisters illuminates the work of grief and survival, the sordid legacies of official historical record and the liberatory practice of intimate narration. Tuffaha writes in the liminal space between languages, personifying Arabic verbs who guide the reader through "history hurtling into the future." Kaan and Her Sisters centers the character  of the Arabic teacher, Miss Sahar, whose progressive displacements from Palestine and across Arab cities unfold in epistles, refashioned songs, and glimpses into the interiors of her lost home. In these disclosures, a study of time and a record of resistance to erasure emerged, and at its heart, the women who keep intergenerational memory. "Our mothers miraculous, persevering./No maps are new to the ancestors."