Overview

“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.”

Full Product Details

9780811237970

Table of Contents

Reviews

"Dunya Mikhail is a woman who speaks like the disillusioned goddesses of Babylon.--Etel Adnan Mikhail sings of the longing and undoing of exile, mourns the loss of her language, describes its gendering and the re-engineering on her tongue, a poet's most important muscle. Delicate, beautiful, day-stopping.--John Freeman ""LitHub"" The dead have words because Mikhail has written them.--Barbara Berman ""The Rumpus"""

""Dunya Mikhail is a woman who speaks like the disillusioned goddesses of Babylon."" -- Etel Adnan ""The dead have words because Mikhail has written them."" -- Barbara Berman - The Rumpus ""Mikhail sings of the longing and undoing of exile, mourns the loss of her language, describes its gendering and the re-engineering on her tongue, a poet’s most important muscle. Delicate, beautiful, day-stopping."" -- John Freeman - LitHub

"""Dunya Mikhail is a woman who speaks like the disillusioned goddesses of Babylon."" -- Etel Adnan ""The dead have words because Mikhail has written them."" -- Barbara Berman - The Rumpus ""Mikhail sings of the longing and undoing of exile, mourns the loss of her language, describes its gendering and the re-engineering on her tongue, a poet’s most important muscle. Delicate, beautiful, day-stopping."" -- John Freeman - LitHub"

Author Information

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. She is the author of the poetry collections The War Works Hard (shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize), Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (winner of the Arab American Book Award), The Iraqi Nights (winner of the Poetry Magazine Translation Award), and In Her Feminine Sign (chosen as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019 by The New York Public Library). Her nonfiction book The Beekeeper was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her debut novel, The Bird Tattoo, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Mikhail won the UNESCO Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture and the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available