Tablets
Secrets of the Clay
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"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."
About this Author
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.
Reviews
"Dunya Mikhail is a woman who speaks like the disillusioned goddesses of Babylon."
"The dead have words because Mikhail has written them."
"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."
"This refreshing volume expands poetry's definition with white space that gives breath to moving hand-drawn images and their accompanying poems... Shadows, vases, music--the simplest experiences extend and challenge in Mikhail's hands."
""'Poetry is how the fish discovers / The third shore of the river.' Tablets: Secrets of the Clay takes us to that third shore, honors our losses, and releases them to swim in eternal waters.""
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