Böcker av Dunya Mikhail

These short poems, considered as Iraqi haiku, reflect an urgent wisdom beyond their original borders.

"A bullet / then a siren / then ruins / then a bird song telling the truth"--Dunya Mikhail In her marvelous new poetry collection Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, Dunya Mikhail transforms the world's first symbols--Sumerian glyphs that were carved onto clay tablets--into the matter of our everyday contemporary life. Each of the ten sections in her book is composed of twenty-four short poems, and each poem combines both text and drawing. In her note to the collection, Mikhail writes, "I practiced at least two layers of translation in these tablets: the first from words in one language, Arabic, to another, English; and the second from words to images. What I received from my ancestors are offerings of the future rather than of the past. Now it's my turn to offer them to you."

A powerful and sweeping novel set over two tumultuous decades in Iraq from the National Book Award-nominated author of The Beekeeper. Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

Mikhail writes: "Death always looks for us. It comes from beyond the continents. It crosses long distances holding a basket of fire in its hand."The two halves of Mikhail's book merge past and present in a lyrical memoir that moves between memories of her childhood, her father's death, her Iraqi poet-peers and friends, her job as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer, and culminates with the birth of her daughter Larsa.

A brilliant poetic exploration of language and gender, place and time, through the mirror of exile.

The Iraqi Nights is the third collection by the acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. Taking The One Thousand and One Nights as her central theme, Mikhail personifies the role of Scheherazade the storyteller, saving herself through her tales. The nights are endless, seemingly as dark as war in this haunting collection, seemingly as endless as war. Yet the poet cannot stop dreaming of a future beyond the violence of a place where "every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun." Unlike Scheherazade, however, Mikhail is writing, not to escape death, but to summon the strength to endure. Inhabiting the emotive spaces between Iraq and the U.S., Mikhail infuses those harsh realms with a deep poetic intimacy. The author's vivid illustrations - inspired by Sumerian tablets - are threaded throughout this powerful book.