'How magnificent the war is!
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning,
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places,
swings corpses through the air,
rolls stretchers to the wounded,
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers,
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins...
...The war works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.'

from 'The War Works Hard'

"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.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Saadi Simawe



ONE. THE WAR WORKS HARD (2004)



Bag of Bones

Shoemaker

The War Works Hard

The Game

The Prisoner

A Drop of Water

Inanna

An Urgent Call

Non-Military Statements

Between Two Wars

Tough Rose

The Jewel

A Voice

Travel Agency

O

Santa Claus

Buzz

Crashed Acts

Snowstorm

To Any Other Place

I Was In A Hurry

America

Silent Movie

Laheeb and the City

The Rocking Chair

Traces

The Foreigner

Five Minutes



 TWO. FROM ALMOST MUSIC (1997)



The Cup

The Resonance

The Artist Child

The Departure of Friends

A Tombstone

The Theory of Absence

Nothing Here is Enough

What's New?

The Pomegranate Seeds

With One Look From Him

An Orange



 THREE. FROM THE PSALMS OF ABSENCE (1993)



Behind the Glass

The Nun

The New Year

Transformations of the Child and the Moon

The Chaldean's Ruins

The Shadow of a Tear

Pronouns



Notes