La poetessa irachena di fama internazionale Dunya Mikhail rinuncia alla poesia per restituire una realtà dolorosa e attuale, come quella delle donne yazide rapite dagli uomini di Daesh. In una prosa che ha il tono di un reportage, spezzato a tratti da qualche ricordo e qualche verso poetico, Mikhail ci racconta una realtà quotidiana di ordinaria resistenza, parlando delle donne che sono riuscite a scappare. Il libro si dipana su un doppio filo: le loro storie e la vita di Abdullah. Apicoltore del Sinjar, abituato a viaggiare tra Siria e Iraq per vendere il suo miele, Abdullah usa ora i suoi contatti per salvare le donne rapite. Quando gli parlano di 'sopravvissute', che Daesh definisce 'schiave sessuali', lui corregge chiamandole 'regine'. Trae il termine dalla società delle api, che considera un modello di giustizia e armonia: se muore una regina, muore tutto un alveare. La comunità yazida gli si stringe intorno, organizzando collette per finanziare i salvataggi. Testimonianza di un'umanità ferita ma non vinta, e capace ancora di sorridere, il libro ci svela uno spicchio del Medio Oriente di oggi, bello e martoriato, a cui dovremmo prestare più attenzione.

The Iraqi Nights is the third collection by the acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. Taking The One Thousand and One Nights as her central theme, Mikhail personifies the role of Scheherazade the storyteller, saving herself through her tales. The nights are endless, seemingly as dark as war in this haunting collection, seemingly as endless as war. Yet the poet cannot stop dreaming of a future beyond the violence of a place where “every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun.” Unlike Scheherazade, however, Mikhail is writing, not to escape death, but to summon the strength to endure. Inhabiting the emotive spaces between Iraq and the U.S., Mikhail infuses those harsh realms with a deep poetic intimacy. The author’s vivid illustrations — inspired by Sumerian tablets — are threaded throughout this powerful book.

Fifteen Iraqi Poets compiles fifteen poems, each written by a different, prominent twentieth-century Iraqi poet. Selected, with commentary, by award-winning Iraqi-American poet, Dunya Mikhail, this little anthology is the perfect introduction to a glorious literature that traces its roots back to ancient Sumer — a poetry written by those who have lived through a state of continuous wars and massacres, their laments often opening with a plea to their destroyed homeland, “O Iraq.”

Irachena, cristiana, nata a Baghdad nel 1965, è costretta a fuggire nel 1995. Oggi vive negli USA. Con i suoi versi la poetessa non si stanca di denunciare l'orrore della guerra e i suoi frutti avvelenati, siano essi i massacri del dittatore iracheno, o le torture nel carcere di Abu Ghraib sotto occupazione americana.

An impressionistic memoir by the award-winning Iraqi-American writer, Dunya Mikhail, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea covers her earliest sensations of childhood to a more complicated grasp of death, beginning with the death of her father to the Gulf War and the subsequent Iraqi War. Mikhail writes: “Death always looks for us. It comes from beyond the continents. It crosses long distances holding a basket of fire in its hand.”

Revolutionary poetry by an exiled Iraqi woman. Winner of a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award. "Yesterday I lost a country," Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a revolutionary work by an exiled Iraqi poether first to appear in English. Amidst the ongoing atrocities in Iraq, here is an important new voice that rescues the human spirit from the ruins, unmasking the official glorification of war with telegraphic lexical austerity. Embracing literary traditions from ancient Mesopotamian mythology to Biblical and Qur'anic parables to Western modernism, Mikhail's poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.