Dunya Mikhail

Tablets: Secrets of the Clay

Poetry, 2024

The Bird Tattoo

Novel, 2022

Helen is a young Yazidi woman, living with her family in a mountain village in Sinjar, northern Iraq. One day she finds a local bird caught in a trap, and frees it, just as the trapper, Elias, returns. At first angry, he soon sees the error of his ways and vows never to keep a bird captive again.

Helen and Elias fall deeply in love, marry and start a family in Sinjar.  The village has seemed to stand apart from time, protected by the mountains and too small to attract much political notice. But their happy existence is suddenly shattered when Elias, a journalist, goes missing. A brutal organization is sweeping over the land, infiltrating even the remotest corners, its members cloaking their violence in religious devotion. Helen’s search for her husband results in her own captivity and enslavement.

She eventually escapes her captors and is reunited with some of her family. But her life is forever changed. Elias remains missing and her sons, now young recruits to the organization, are like strangers. Will she find harmony and happiness again?

For readers of Elif Shafak, Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, or Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, Dunya Mikhail’s The Bird Tattoo chronicles a world of great upheaval, love and loss, beauty and horror, and will stay in readers’ minds long after the last page.

In Her Feminine Sign

Poetry, 2019

At the heart of In Her Feminine Sign, Dunya Mikhail’s luminous new collection of poems, is the Arabic suffix ta-marbuta, “the tied circle,” a circle with two dots above it that indicates a feminine word, or sign. This tied circle transforms into the moon, a stone that binds friendship, birdsong over ruins, and a hymn to Nisaba, the goddess of writing. Her “Iraqi haiku” in one section unfold like Sumerian symbols carved onto clay tablets, transmuted into the stuff of our ordinary, daily life and 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.” With a deceptive simplicity and disquieting humor reminiscent of Wislawa Szymborska, and a lyricism wholly her own, Mikhail slips between her child-hood in Baghdad and her present life in Detroit, between Ground Zero and amass grave, tracing new circles of light.

The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Irag

Nonfiction, 2018

Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women. The Beekeeper, by the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, tells the harrowing stories of several women who managed to escape the clutches of Daesh. Mikhail extensively interviews these women—who’ve lost their families and loved ones, who’ve been repeatedly sold, raped, psychologically tortured, and forced to manufacture chemical weapons—and as their tales unfold, an unlikely hero emerges: a beekeeper, who uses his knowledge of the local terrain, along with a wide network of transporters, helpers, and former cigarette smugglers, to bring these women, one by one, through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, back into safety. In the face of inhuman suffering, this powerful work of nonfiction offers a counterpoint to Daesh’s genocidal extremism: hope, as ordinary people risk their lives to save those of others.

The Iraqi Nights

Poetry, 2014

“The Iraqi Nights is a haunting and captivating collection of poetry that will ensnare you into its beguiling spell.” —Absolute Magazine

The Iraqi Nights is the third collection by acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. In this book she person­ifies the role of Scheherazade in the Thousand and One Nights, who saves herself through the telling of her tales. But unlike Scheherazade, Mikhail isn’t writing to escape death but confronts it through grief and love while summoning the strength to endure. Though the nights are dark in this haunting collection, seemingly as endless as war, the poet cannot stop dreaming of a future beyond the violence, of a country where “every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun.” Mikhail threads her vivid illustrations of ancient Sumerian tab­lets and her handwritten Arabic through an imaginative sequence of haiku-like poems that provide a powerful visual counterpoint.

Fifteen Iraqi Poets

Anthology, 2013

A collection of dazzling new, contemporary poetry from Iraq, edited by award-winning Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail, Fifteen Iraqi Poets compiles fifteen poems, each written by a different, prominent twentieth-century Iraqi poet. Selected, with commentary by 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.”

Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea

Memoir, 2009

“Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea is a peerless record of the Iraq wars. There is much to learn from and reflect upon, especially for those of us who are Americans, in Mikhail’s beautiful and stirring genre-bending poem.” —Englewood Review of Books 

Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea covers Mikhail’s 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.” The two halves of Mikhail’s book merge past and present in a lyrical memoir that moves between memories of her childhood, her father’s death, her Iraqi poet-peers and friends, her job as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer, and culminates with the birth of her daughter Larsa.

The War Works Hard

Poetry, 2005

“Dunya Mikhail’s poems differ from most war poems by the simple fact that she writes about war as a woman, mother, wife and friend.” —Poetry International 

“Yesterday I lost a country,” Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a revolutionary work by an exiled Iraqi poet—her 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.

In the poem “Bags of bones,” she writes:

To give back to your mother
on the occasion of death
a handful of bones
she had given to you
on the occasion of birth?