Threshold Themes in Something about Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

This poetry collection explores borders and boundaries beginning with the first poem "Transit."

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha partitions her National Book Award winning collection of poems into three sections, simply labeled I, II, and III. Conspicuously, one poem lives outside the numerical walls. It's called "Transit, and it stands alone at the beginning of the book, like an eerie prologue.

"Transit" quietly announces that Tuffaha plans to explore boundaries, thresholds, and lots of other in-between spaces in Something about Living. "Transit" itself is a threshold: the reader must cross over it to get inside the collection. What's more, the poem's title and content all have to do with starting a journey. In the opening stanza, the speaker watches a bird take flight. This bird drops a feather on the "cusp / of a hillside," and the speaker doesn't really know what to do next, except look down at flowers on the ground. Their last stanza is loaded with tentativeness. They want to pick the flowers, but to what end? For sustenance? For scrapbooking? The speaker's use of modal verbs "could" and "might" indicates that they see possibilities, but don't know which direction to go in yet. They're like that feather left behind: floating on a cusp, easily blown one way or the other if the wind picks up.

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Note on the photo. I made the digital collage at the top of this post with images taken from the lines of "Transit," the poem by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha discussed in this post. The collage features a hoopoe, a feather, and wild cyclamen.

I’m working on an annotating guide!

One that will cover all the threshold imagery in this collection.

Stay tuned.