The Iraqi Nights
2014
First Published
3.93
Average Rating
112
Number of Pages
A stunning new collection by one of Iraq’s brightest poetic voices The Iraqi Nights is the third collection by the acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. Taking The One Thousand and One Nights as her central theme, Mikhail personifies the role of Scheherazade the storyteller, saving herself through her tales. The nights are endless, seemingly as dark as war in this haunting collection, seemingly as endless as war. Yet the poet cannot stop dreaming of a future beyond the violence of a place where “every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun.” Unlike Scheherazade, however, Mikhail is writing, not to escape death, but to summon the strength to endure. Inhabiting the emotive spaces between Iraq and the U.S., Mikhail infuses those harsh realms with a deep poetic intimacy. The author’s vivid illustrations ― inspired by Sumerian tablets ― are threaded throughout this powerful book.
Avg Rating
3.93
Number of Ratings
217
5 STARS
30%
4 STARS
39%
3 STARS
24%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
1%
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Author
Dunya Mikhail
Author · 7 books
Born in Iraq in 1965, Dunya Mikhail worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer. Facing increasing threats from the Iraqi authorities, she fled first to Jordan, then to the United States. In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. Mikhail’s translator Elizabeth Winslow won a 2004 Pen Translation Fund Award for her first book in English, The War Works Hard (2005), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and was named one of the twenty-five books to remember by the New York Public Library in 2005. New Directions also published Mikhail’s Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea (2009), which won the 2010 Arab American Book Award for poetry. She currently lives in Michigan and works as an Arabic instructor for Michigan State University.
