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In Dunya Mikhail’s ‘The Bird Tattoo,’ Iraqi women are sold as slaves

In THE BIRD TATTOO, Dunya Mikhail

saw it as her duty to speak for women whose stories might otherwise be lost.

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https://www.arabnews.com/node/2578451/books

"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."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." 

"Mikhail’s fourth book of poetry to appear in English, In Her Feminine Sign, differs from her previous collections in that she wrote this book in both Arabic and English, “from right to left and from left to right.” She didn’t translate her poems, nor did she have a translator; she actually wrote the poems twice."

"The poems range between longer descriptions of people in/and places, to shorter pieces that Mikhail suggests are an ‘attempt to write Iraqi haiku’. But what connects the poems is the way Mikhail explores processes and their accoutrements, their spin-offs and accessories."

"Mikhail’s poetic recalls an Arabic style known as al-sahl al-mumtane’, language that delivers information and emotion with great fluidity but without excess, a kind of lucid restraint that contains multitudes."

"WHY I CHOSE DUNYA MIKHAIL’S IN HER FEMININE SIGN FOR THE RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB"

"Full of gently-delivered lines that rumble with resonance, Mikhail’s poems are worth pondering—and they will often leave readers with much to carry forward."

Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper and In Her Feminine Sign

In Her Feminine Sign

Like a Schindler for Iraq, This Unlikely War Hero Freed Women From ISIS

The Beekeeper of Sinjar by Dunya Mikhail review – the Iraqi Oskar Schindler

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

"This remarkable book tells of one man's attempts to fight back and to rescue his people from a life of horror."

"Powerful and heartbreaking, this work lets the survivors tell their stories and highlights the courage of those risking their lives to rescue others."

"Powerful and heartbreaking, this work lets the survivors tell their stories and highlights the courage of those risking their lives to rescue others."

"All but true believers suffer under Daesh, Mikhail makes abundantly clear—but especially women. A powerful study."

Acts of kindness amid the torment and violence of Iraq

"In a harrowing compilation of true stories charting the fate of women abducted by IS in Iraq, Dunya Mikhail shows how the best of human qualities can persist even in the worst of times."

Reading Dunya Mikhail’s New Book on Daesh’s Survivors

"The Beekeeper, by Iraqi poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, offers a window into the almost unthinkable experiences of those persecuted by Daesh either for religious belief or refusal to submit to their rule (see WLT, Jan. 2018, 48–52). 

"Across many time zones, over countless cell phone calls, through layers of language, Mikhail delivers with clarity and boldness."

This Iraqi poet conveys the pity of war, marrying the terrifying with the everyday. We often associate war poetry with the First World War's soldier poets, but women have also written war poetry, notably from contemporary conflicts where civilians are the main victims.

Ineffable Poetics: Negotiating Exile and Literary Self-Expression via Wittgenstein’s City Metaphor

"The poems incorporate history, myth, and intimate lyricism, from the centuries that have passed "since Scheherazade told her tale"

"The title poem, the first in the volume, combines prose, short lyrics, and line drawings to portray the weight of war and conflict in her native country..."

"In the first year of war, they play “bride and groom” counting everything on their fingers: the faces reflected in the rivers, the waves that take them and disappear, and the names of the newborns."

"In a culture that privileges prose, reviewing poetry is fairly pointless. And I’ve long since stopped caring about what the world reads and dropped the crusade to get Americans to read more poems." Part of the fault, as I’ve suggested in past reviews, rests with poets who seem hell-bent on insulating their art from the community at large, which is why Dunya Mikhail’s work, which work sin so much the opposite manner, is always such a pleasure. It’s enough to get me screaming back into the void.

Dunya Mikhail: The Modern Sappho Of The Middle East

"Her third collection, The Iraqi Nights,is a beautiful and poignant examination of violence and war but also a story of hope and endurance."

"The Iraqi Nights (2014), reimagines what it means to be

an exile."

"Poet Dunya Mikhail fled iraq- but still carries home with her."

Human Rights Poetry and the Poetics of Nonhuman Being: Dunya Mikhail’s Writing of Disaster

When verse is the only language

"This moral clarity, carrying through the two distinct parts of her work, makes Diary of a Wave outside the Seaa peerless record of the Iraq wars. There is much to learn from and reflect upon, especially for those of us who are Americans, in Mikhail’s beautiful and stirring genre-bending poem."

"This memoir-infused narrative poem, written over two decades by Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail, provides a unique reading experience."

2010 festival blog

"The way the book is laid out feels like a metaphor."

"Reading Dunya Mikhail's lyrical and poetic memoir Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea is like diving into a watery, dreamy world. One must leave behind rationale, urges for temporal grounding and a reliance on facts. Mikhail pulls you into her impressionistic world like a strong tide, tossing the reader about with strong visuals, sensitive perspectives, poetic questions, snippets, and philosophic observations:"

The Literature of War

This article explores the (un)translatability of ṭarab—typically understood as feeling ecstasy in response to poetic and musical performances—in the recitation of Arabic poems and their translation in a US context. I compare Dunya Mikhail’s Arabic and English performances of selected poems from al-Ḥarbu taʿmalū bi-jidd [The War Works Hard, 2000; 2005] with an English performance by the translator, Elizabeth Winslow. Through this comparison, I theorize ṭarab as an affective force that transcends language in general and Arab(ic/ness) more specifically. Drawing on Jonathan Shannon’s affirmation of the multiplicities of ṭarab contexts, I argue that ṭarab is evoked in distinctly diverse iterations in the performances of the poet and the translator as well as in the poet’s different voicings of the poem, in written and oral forms. This theorization of ṭarab expands the term’s application beyond its limited association with Arabic poetry and music to a broader aesthetics of wajd and orature.

"As the first translation of poems by a female Iraqi poet to be published in the United States, The War Works Hard is a timely book, equipped to meet the demands of those readers who expect from poetry the kind of relevance that William Carlos Williams had in mind when he wrote, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” 

"Any reader or the most compeling war poetry of our epoch may readily discern a marked shift in perspectve Detween the best verse dealing with the World Wars or Vietnam and Dunya Mikhails major lyrics grappling with the succession of wars in

Iraq to which she has borne personal witness..."

Mikhail's personification has special ironic form...It approaches the subject of violent destruction with cutting wit, fierce humor, and brave humanity.

"Brecht wrote, ‘We’d all be human if we could,’ and Mikhail, despite all the contrary evidence, shows that we can, and sometimes are." 

Bertold Brecht meets Dunya Mikhail

Meet Dunya Mikhail, An Iraqi Poet Worth Knowing--Profundity With a Light Touch

""The War Works Hard", a poem by the Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail in the New Directionsanthology of poetry World Beat, strikes me as the real thing."

Psychological Effects of War on Women in Iraq: An Analysis in the Light of Dunya Mikhail’s Poem 'The Cup'

Dunya Mikhail is the first Iraqi contemporary poet translated into English

Carcanet review

"Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail connects any reader to the love of that lucky Iraqi woman clinging to her bag of bones."