The War Works Hard
2005
First Published
4.04
Average Rating
96
Number of Pages
Mikhail’s poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion. Revolutionary poetry by an exiled Iraqi woman. Winner of a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award. "Yesterday I lost a country," Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a revolutionary work by an exiled Iraqi poether first to appear in English. Amidst the ongoing atrocities in Iraq, here is an important new voice that rescues the human spirit from the ruins, unmasking the official glorification of war with telegraphic lexical austerity. Embracing literary traditions from ancient Mesopotamian mythology to Biblical and Qur'anic parables to Western modernism, Mikhail's poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.
Avg Rating
4.04
Number of Ratings
218
5 STARS
32%
4 STARS
46%
3 STARS
18%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads
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.
