To All the Yellow Flowers |
“Tuffaha wonderfully spills and sprawls in such a way that her work does beautiful pirouettes across a painful diaspora while demanding us to consider if liberation is even possible outside of our mother tongues.”
- Javon JohnsonKilling Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities “A reminder that perhaps we all need to be heard, to be seen, to know that it is not only okay but good to be who we are, and good to share our own stories.”
- Gary LawlessOwner of Gulf of Maine Books |
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Winner, 2020 Swarthmore Intercultural Center Arts & Activism Award
Featured, Ms. Magazine's 2020 National Poetry Month Roundup Honorable Mention, The New Arab's "Best Books by Arab Authors in 2020" Golden Antelope Press. 2020.
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What makes someone whole? What does it mean to be unbroken? And how does this “unbreaking” process begin?
To All the Yellow Flowers is a narrative poetry collection that tells a story of learning to rebuild, to rekindle. The story focuses on parallels: those we cannot fully draw, those we wish not to see, and those between. In her debut collection, Raya Tuffaha tackles questions of Palestinian-American and Muslim identity, queerness, femininity, diaspora, belonging, heritage, and the language we use to discuss it all. With focus, care, and a little bit of light, Raya honors every part of her history and present, and in doing so, starts to build her own future. |