Synopses & Reviews
"Yesterday I lost a country," Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a revolutionary work by an exiled Iraqi poet her 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. Mikhail, who fled from Iraq to avoid persecution under Saddam Hussien's regime, received the U.N. Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing in 2001. The translation, by Elizabeth Winslow, received a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award.
Synopsis
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 the Author
Dunya Mikhail is a teacher of Arabic and graduate student in Near East Studies, Wayne State University. Previously, she received a B.A. in English literature from the University of Baghdad. She was Managing Director, Al-Mashreq Company for Press in Amman, Jordan (1995-96) and Literary Editor, the Baghdad Observer (1988-95). Her works include Bleeding of the Sea, (poetry, 1986) Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, (creative writing, 1999) The Songs of Absence, (poetry, 1993) Almost Music, (poetry, 1997) and The War Works Hard (poetry, 2000).