The War Works Hard - Softcover

Dunya Mikhail; Saadi S. Simawe; Elizabeth Winslow

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811216217 ISBN 13: 9780811216210

Publisher: New Directions, 2005

Synopsis

Mikhail’s poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.

Revolutionary poetry by an exiled Iraqi woman. Winner of a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award. "Yesterday I lost a country," Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a revolutionary work by an exiled Iraqi poether first to appear in English. Amidst the ongoing atrocities in Iraq, here is an important new voice that rescues the human spirit from the ruins, unmasking the official glorification of war with telegraphic lexical austerity. Embracing literary traditions from ancient Mesopotamian mythology to Biblical and Qur'anic parables to Western modernism, Mikhail's poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.

About this title

About the 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

"What good luck!/ She has found his bones." So begins a litany of horrors from an Iraqi poet who witnessed Saddam's regime's atrocities firsthand. Mikhail, 40, works in Arabic, Chaldean and English, and had to flee Iraq in the years just before the current war; after a stint in Jordan, she now lives in Michigan, where the poems in the first section here were composed over the past few years. They are forceful and direct, with ironies that ring through their blunt admonishments: "Please don't ask me, America./ I don't remember their names/ or their birthplaces./ People are grass—/ they grow everywhere, America." In some, the speaker imagines life in wartime Iraq or writes in one of its many voices, including mythic ones ("I am Inanna," begins one in the Sumerian love goddess' voice, "[a}nd this is my city"). In others, she channels grief or anger, as in a bitter and beautiful set of "Non-Military Statements." The book's other two sections contain poems from the earlier collections Almost Music (1997) and The Psalms of Absence (1993) respectively; their coverage of the Gulf War makes clear just how much, for Iraqis, war has been a nightmarish way of life, with the U.S. playing a recurrent role. Stark and poignant, Mikhail's poems give voice to an often buried, glossed-over or spun grief. (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811216217
• ISBN 13: 9780811216210
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96