Description
"A bullet / then a siren / then ruins / then a bird song telling the truth"--Dunya Mikhail
In her marvelous new poetry collection Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, Dunya Mikhail transforms the world's first symbols--Sumerian glyphs that were carved onto 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."
Product Details
| Publisher | New Directions Publishing Corporation |
| Publish Date | September 03, 2024 |
| Pages | 144 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780811237970 |
| Dimensions | 8.9 X 5.9 X 0.5 inches | 0.4 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
This refreshing volume expands poetry's definition with white space that gives breath to moving hand-drawn images and their accompanying poems... Shadows, vases, music--the simplest experiences extend and challenge in Mikhail's hands.--Cindy Ok "Poetry Northwest"
Dunya Mikhail is a woman who speaks like the disillusioned goddesses of Babylon.--Etel Adnan
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.--John Freeman "LitHub"
The dead have words because Mikhail has written them.--Barbara Berman "The Rumpus"
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