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In Her Feminine Sign

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At the heart of Dunya Mikhail’s luminous new collection of poems, her fourth in English, is the Arabic suffix ta-marbuta, “the tied circle,” a circle with two dots above it that determines a feminine word, or sign. This tied circle transforms into the moon, a stone that binds friendship, birdsong over ruins, three kidnapped women, and a hymn to Nisaba, the goddess of writing. A section of “Iraqi haiku” unfold like shimmering translations of carved Sumerian symbols on clay tablets. These tablets later transform into the digital tablets we carry to Mars. In another poem, Mikhail ponders the Sumerian word for “freedom,” Ama-ar-gi, “what seeps out / from the dead into our dreams.” In Her Feminine Sign follows on the heels of Mikhail’s devastating account of Daesh kidnappings and killings of Yazidi women in Iraq, The Beekeeper of Sinjar. It is the first book she has written in both Arabic and English, not translated but “twice-written,” as she says: “The poet at home in both texts, yet she remains a stranger.” With a deceptive simplicity and disquieting humour reminiscent of Wislawa Szymborszka, and a lyricism wholly her own, Mikhail slips between her childhood in Baghdad and her present life in Detroit, between Ground Zero and a mass grave, between a game of chess and a flamingo, tracing new circles of light.
Born in Iraq in 1965, Dunya Mikhail worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer. Facing increasing threats from the Iraqi authorities, she fled first to Jordan, then to the United States. In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. Mikhail’s translator Elizabeth Winslow won a 2004 Pen Translation Fund Award for her first book in English, the poetry collection The War Works Hard (Carcanet, 2006), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and was named one of the twenty-five books to remember by the New York Public Library in 2005. Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea (2009) won the 2010 Arab American Book Award for poetry. Her third collection, The Iraqi Nights, was published in 2014. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and her non-fiction debut, The Beekeeper of Sinjar, was published to great acclaim, including being longlisted for the inaugural National Book Award for Translated Literature. She currently lives in Michigan and works as an Arabic instructor for Oakland University.
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