Description
A gorgeous fusion of poetry and image by “one of the foremost poets of our time” (The Christian Science Monitor).
“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.”
Reviews
"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
"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
"“‘Poetry is how the fish discovers / The third shore of the river.’ Tablets: Secrets of the Clay takes us to that third shore, honors our losses, and releases them to swim in eternal waters.”" — Amanda Holmes Duffy, Washington Independent Review of Books
Standalone Ebook
9780811237987
COMING SOON