"Yesterday I lost a country," Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a subversive, sobering work by an exiled Iraqi poet, and her first collection to appear in English. Compassionate, engaged and direct, Mikhail's is a voice that transcends boundaries, and one that has rarely seemed more necessary.
Dunya Mikhail writes an Arabic poetry for the twenty-first century - urgent and painful, composed our of successive experiences of violence and exile. She remakes the traditional forms and imagery of Arabic poetry to give voice to women's experience of war, to the experiences of lovers, children and mothers, those whose vulnerability is also the tenacious humanity that gives hope of survival and new beginnings.
An Iraqi, now living in the United States, Mikhail writes and speaks in Arabic, Arameic and English. Her literary inheritance embraces ancient myths, the sacred books of Christianity and Islam, and Western modernism, and she inhabits cultures that range from deep-rooted traditions to the brutalities of modern states. Mikhail has collaborated closely with the translator Elizabeth Winslow in publishing this collection.

Prizes

Winner of PEN Translation Fund Award 2004,Short-listed for Griffin Poetry Prize 2005

'Here is the new Iraqi poetry: terse, unadorned, stripped and ironic...her voice is the inescapable voice of Arab poetry today.'
Pierre Joris

Paul Batchelor, Poetry Review, Vol 96:4, Winter 2006/7
Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi poet currently living in the United States. Her most recent poems are found in the first and longest section of The War Works Hard. Although Saadi Simawe's introduction describes these poems as child-like (albeit like the wise, subversive child of The Emperor's New Clothes), these are songs of experience rather than innocence. When the truth is as bitter and bleak as this, it requires irony if it is to be expressed at all. This is from 'Bag of Bones':
What good luck!
She has found his bones.
The skull is also in the bag
the bag in her hand
like all other bags
in all other trembling hands.
His bones, like thousands of bones
in the mass graveyard [...]
In the brilliant title poem, Mikhail displays a Brechtian knach for finding the unexpected angle that can illuminate a situation afresh. The poem begins 'How magnificent the war is!' and goes on to form an ironic hymn of praise to war:
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books [...]
The War Works Hard closes with poems written in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war. These pieces are more demanding, with the irony working as a necessary cryptic device for the author's sympathies (see the gnomic 'Nun'). The bulk of the book is taken up with the later, more public poetry in which Mikhail finds ways of writing about Iraq without indulging in sloganeering, glibness, cynicism or any of the other prefabrications commentators use to avoid the truth. In Elizabeth's clear, unfussy translation, an important new voice in world poetry can be heard in English.

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. She is a laureate of the UNESCO Sharja Prize for Arab Culture and has received fellowships from the United States Artists, the Guggenheim, and Kresge. The United Nations granted her Human Rights Watch Award for freedom of writing and Arab America listed her as 'one of ten modern Arab writers who should make Arabs proud'. According to the Christian Science Monitor, 'Dunya Mikhail is one of the foremost poets of our time'. She currently works as a special lecturer of Arabic and poetry at Oakland University in Michigan.