Maya Abu Al-Hayyat on You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, translator, and co-founder of the Institute for Middle East Understanding. She’s also the author of the poetry collections Water & Salt and Letters from the Interior, and the chapbook Arab in Newsland. She can claim the experiences of a first-generation American, immigrant, and expatriate, and has lived in and traveled across the Arab world. Many of her poems are inspired by the experience of crossing cultural, geographic, and political borders, borders between languages, and between the present and the living past.

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a poet, the editor of The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction, and a contributor to A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Irish Times, and Literary Hub. She is also the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, which seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities. In You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions), translated by Fady Joudah, the ordinary and profound moments of life under Israeli occupation include art, garlic, taxis, sleepy soldiers at checkpoints, the smell of trash on a winter street, lovers who don’t return, making beds, cleaning up vomit, and reading recipes. Here, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strange moments. “It matters to me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat, “what you’re thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling.” You Can Be the Last Leaf offers a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority.