In the Press

“Mikhail’s work is an acknowledgment of war’s incomprehensibility and a resistance against it. Perhaps only fiction is capacious enough to contain the kind of cruelty and endurance that overwhelms our understanding of what’s possible. A striking act of imagination that recasts her earlier research with new emotional power.”

"Compelling reading. Just because this is fiction doesn’t mean it isn’t true... The bird tattoo of the title is one of the rare comforting constants, a shared emblem of Helen and Elias’ love within this hellish reign of terror. A harrowing and resonant achievement."

“Iraqi American poet and journalist Mikhail revisits in this frank and wrenching novel the subject of The Beekeeper, her nonfiction narrative about the impact of Daesh, the name for ISIS, on the Yazidi religious minority of northern Iraq. Mikhail’s sympathetic and fast-moving story of ordinary life and its violent disruption makes for a moving love letter to the Yazidi.”

"Mikhail has created a searing portrait of courage, humanity and savagery, told in a mosaic of voices."

"The dead have words because Mikhail has written them."

"This book makes a sound, and it should be a loud one."

"It’s a remarkable, winding work that ascends into dream visions and crawls through gory particulars of war. A child’s perspective mingles freely with the poet’s mature voice, both baffled by the paradoxes of so much beauty and so much destruction."

"one of the foremost poets of our time."

"In Her Feminine Sign is a collection of limpid meditations which demand that we pause as we read. Their stillness and clarity is no miniaturised charm. Instead it’s an utterly articulate clear-sightedness that lets each one deliver a shock. The tragedies of recent and not so recent Iraqi history and the traditions of Arabic verse are the steely structures that underpin her profoundly thought-through work of witness."

"There is no current voice that speaks on war through poetry more candidly, effectively, and beautifully than Dunya Mikhail."

“Dunya Mikhail combines the authenticity of witness to global events with the essential poetic virtue of wit.”

"With plain-spoken clarity, these poems navigate the meaning of home. ‘How many departures can you put up with?’ one asks."

"The stories in The Beekeeper are reminiscent of tales of escapees on the US’s Underground Railroad of the mid-1800s or during the Holocaust. The book is a paean for coexistence in a multiethnic, multi-religious, multilingual Iraq. Powerful and difficult.”

"Dunya Mikhail is a woman who speaks like the disillusioned goddesses of Babylon."

"Somewhere between a cutting-edge film and a 1002nd night of storytelling, interspersed with drawings and calligraphy, Dunya Mikhail's new poems reframe, in a contemporary woman's voice, the great poet al-Sayab's cry from the heart: ‘Iraq, Iraq, nothing but Iraq!’ Here, myth alleviates the exile's longing, and exilic longin itself opens the poet's eyes to broad horizons."

"Here is the new Iraqi poetry: a poetry of urgency that has no time for the traditional (in Arab poetry) flowers of rhetoric; terse, unadorned, stripped & ironic, Dunya Mikhail's lines move at the speed of events–be it war or love. Here the fierceness of the public life meshes with the hard-won tenderness of the private, in a passionate dialectic that makes her voice the inescapable voice of Arab poetry today."

"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."

"Mikhail's poetry- so pure and beautiful- is the best of her generation."

Throughout this newest collection, Dunya Mikhail writes poems of cities, friends, grandmothers, goddesses, of girls who might ‘outgrow / their dresses / while on the road’ to captivity. The poems offer a chronicle of internal life in the landscapes of exile and remembered homeland, always foregrounding the experiences of women. 

"Haunting and captivating—a powerful portrait of courage."

"The poems in this extraordinary collection sway back and forth between America (as a new home) and Baghdad (as a birthplace), between the artifacts of ancient Sumerian civilization and the walls of our modern times. There is no trace of nostalgia in Mikhail’s poetry, though her words feel poignantly real and rare, as if creating a museum of memories."

"Stark and poignant, Mikhail's poems give voice to an often buried, glossed-over or spun grief."

"Powerful, urgent."

"The Beekeeper is a brutally important, electrifying, and lyrical true story."

[Mikhail is] a poet who can take a subject as difficult as the death of a child and write, counter to the human-interest story or sound bite, a poem that will outlast the exigencies of the present."

"Mikhail's work is emotionally uplifting. Her style mentions an impressive fragility and delicacy of image that touches the reader's heart. Indeed, her trademark utmost lucidity of picture is tinged by a radiance of tone that we feel unmistakably spills over from the original language."

"Shakespeare would have enjoyed the poetry of Dunya Mikhail who has spoken of love as a response to a war-torn world – an aesthetic, a value, and a practice."