The theme of light and geography throughout the volume plots the layers of

family and history through three continents and over several generations. The

speaker reveals that she comes “from light, strong and splintered,/ from the

khamsin  browning the sky,/ from walls of gentled stone chiseling a face” (19) in

“Provenance,” illustrating the power of light to cut through even a storm like the

moon and stars in the night sky. In “Origins,” one finds the speaker of the poem

pondering her daughter’s birth and connection to her legacies in the United States,

Cyprus, and Palestine. Reflecting on her birth, the speaker imagines her daughter

wishing to return to the womb in ways that echo her daughter’s future desires to

 return to her points of origin, a return that registers, in particular, with respect to

her right of return to Palestine. This return at times is imagined as “a story scribbled

in a notebook/ misplaced during flight” (45). Generations begin the volume with

 “Reunion,” in which only through death can the speaker meet with her ancestors,

and continue to haunt the reader through striking images in poems like “I Remember

My Father’s Hands,” in which she remembers “because they ripped bread with quiet

 purpose/ dipped fresh green oil like a birthright” (12). In “Tata Olga’s Hands,” the

speaker recalls her grandmother’s hands “brown as the eggs she boiled in onion skins

 for Easter, rough like the bark of jasmine vine that twined its way up the back wall

of her chipped-stone house” (24). Images of hands and light movingly intertwine

when she recalls the healing power of touch between mother and daughter, “I long

for the laying on of hands,/ some touch weaving light between us” (28).