Excerpt from “Tablets V”

Dunya Mikhail

1Light falls from her voiceand I try to catch it as the lastlight of the day fades. . . .But there is no form to touch,no pain to trace.                                         2Are dreamstaking their seatson the night train?                    3She recites a list of wishesto keep him from dying.                                  4The truth lands like a kiss:sometimes like a mosquito,sometimes like a lantern.                                            5Your coffee-colored skinawakens me to the world.                            6We have only one minuteand I love you.                                7All children are poetsuntil they stop reaching forbutterflies that are not there.                  8The moment you thought you lostme,you saw me clearlywith all of my flowers,even the dried ones.

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Color headshot of Dunya Mikhail
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Nina Subin

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, which won the Arab American Book Award; The Iraqi Nights, winner of the Poetry Magazine Translation Award; In Her Feminine Sign, which was chosen as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019 by The New York Public Library; and Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, a section of which was adopted by UNESCO as a sticker. 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. Described by The Christian Science Monitor as “one of the foremost poets of our time,” Mikhail is a laureate of the UNESCO Sharja Prize for Arab Culture and a recipient of the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She has also received fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation. Mikihail’s work has been featured in PBS NewsHour, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Poetry, among others.

Color cover of Tablets: Secrets of the Clay by Dunya Mikhail

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Tablets: Secrets of the Clay
New Directions Publishing

New York, New York

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In her marvellous 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 the ten sections in her book is composed of twenty-four short poems, and each poem combines both text and drawing. In her note to the collection, Mikhail writes, 'I practiced at least two layers of translation in these tablets: the first from words in one language, Arabic, to another, English; and the second from words to images. What I received from my ancestors are offerings of the future rather than of the past. Now it's my turn to offer them to you.'

"Mikhail has long been building a dictionary of symbols—the shell, the flower, the stars—that recur across her books. In Tabletsshe takes the logical next step and creates her own cuneiform."
—Anna Della Subin

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