Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, poetry by Dunya Mikhail

“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 into clay tablets—into the matter of our everyday contemporary life. Each of

Tablets: Secrets of the Clay transforms the world’s first letter symbols, cut onto clay tablets, into matters of our modern everyday life. The poems are accompanied by drawings inspired by the ancient Sumerian images. These short poems, which can be read as Iraqi haiku, invoke an urgent wisdom beyond their original bor