Tablets

'A bullet / then a siren / then ruins / then a bird song telling the truth' - Dunya Mikhail In her marvellous 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.'

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 Griffin Poetry Prize), Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (winner of the Arab American Book Award), The Iraqi Nights (winner of the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation), and In Her Feminine Sign, which was 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 is a recipient of the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She currently teaches Arabic and poetry at Oakland University in Michigan.