Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Water & Salt is one of the most gorgeous renderings of the Levant I’ve ever read. Tuffaha, an Arab-American poet of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian heritage, writes from a place of familial memory and nostalgia, a place of longing and loss, of displacement and deciphering home. Tuffaha’s poems are required reading material for any Arab-American literature list, and for all Americans whose knowledge of the Middle East ends at what the media reports.