Join us Sunday, September 22 from 3-4 p.m. at Book Beat for a poetry reading and signing with Dunya Mikhail. This event celebrates the release of Mikhail’s newest poetry collection Tablets: Secrets of the Clay which releases September 3 from New Directions. Mikhail is an Iraqi-American poet, novelist, journalist, and teaches Arabic and poetry at Oakland University.
Copies of Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, as well as some of her other titles, will be available at the event.
This event is free and open to the public. Please email bookbeatorders@gmail.com or give us a call at 248-968-1190 for more information.
“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 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’s style maintains an impressive fragility and delicacy of image that touches the reader’s heart…”—American Poetry Review
“Dunya Mikhail is a woman who speaks like the disillusioned goddesses of Babylon.”—Etel Adnan
“The dead have words because Mikhail has written them”—Barbara Berman, The Rumpus
“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
“In many ways, poetry itself is an act of mythmaking, a form of alchemy that transforms reality into something timeless, allowing us to revisit and reshape our own truths. Mythology is a living presence in my poetry, a dynamic framework through which I explore universal emotions and struggles that continue to resonate in contemporary life.”
—-Dunya Mikhail Talks Mythology , interview on LitHub
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 Griffon Poetry Prize), Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (winner of the Arab American Book Award), The Iraqi Nights (winner of the Poetry Magazine Translation Award), and In Her Feminine Sign (chosen as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019 by The New York Public Library). 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. Mikhail is a laureate of the UNESCO Sharja Prize for Arab Culture and has received the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing, as well as fellowships from the United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation. She currently teaches Arabic and poetry at Oakland University in Michigan.