Free Downloads

The War Works Hard

Mikhail’s poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.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.

Paperback: 96 pages

Publisher: New Directions; First Edition edition (April 17, 2005)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0811216217

ISBN-13: 978-0811216210

Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.3 x 9 inches

Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #769,998 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #136 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Themes & Styles > Death, Grief & Loss #188 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Regional & Cultural > Middle Eastern #589 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Women Authors

This book is full of eloquent and very forceful poems dealing with life in Iraq and some of its heart wrenching experiences during the last 20 years. Many of these poems have appeared in Arabic in a book with the same title (In Arabic, *Al-harb taamal bijidd*) published by Al-Mada P.C., Damascus, Syria. The translation into English by Elizabeth Winslow is excellent and conveys a lot of the simplicity and force of the original poems.What I admire most in Dunya Mikhail's poetry is her ability to take simple words and turn them into beautiful poems that, alternately, delight, move, surprise, and even baffle her readers. This simplicity of words is more apparent in Arabic than in English. Typical of her poetry and its unexpected effect on the reader is "The Jewel," a poem in which she compares the collapse of a bridge during the 1991 American bombing of Baghdad to the dropping of a jewel by the lady on the Titanic. "It no longer stretches across the river. / It is not in the city, / not on the map. / The bridge that was . . . / The bridge that we were . . . /The Pontoon bridge / we crossed every day . . . / Dropped by the war into the river / just like the blue jewel / that lady dropped / off the side of the Titanic."In another poem she writes, "Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and didn't notice when it fell from me / like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. / Please, if anyone passes by / and stumbles across it, / perhaps in a suitcase / open to the sky, / or engraved on a rock / like a gaping wound, / ... / If anyone stumbles across it, / return it to me please. / Please return it, sir. / Please return it, madam. / It is my country . . . / I was in a hurry / when I lost it yesterday.

The War Works Hard The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Learn Ruby the Hard Way: A Simple and Idiomatic Introduction to the Imaginative World Of Computational Thinking with Code (3rd Edition) (Zed Shaw's Hard Way Series) The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz: A 30-minute Instaread Chapter by Chapter Summary Stones of Remembrance: A Rock-Hard Faith From Rock-Hard Places I.M. Wright's Hard Code: A Decade of Hard-Won Lessons from Microsoft (Developer Best Practices) How It Works: Big Rigs (How It Works (Simon & Schuster)) The Confessions: (Vol. I/1) Revised, (The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century) (The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Vol. 1) Works of Love Are Works of Peace: Mother Teresa of Calcutta and the Missionaries of Charity The Collected Works of Billy Graham: Three Bestselling Works Complete in One Volume (Angels, How to Be Born Again, and The Holy Spirit) Luther's Works, Volume 41:Church and Ministry III (Luther's Works (Augsburg)) How the Immune System Works (The How it Works Series) Network Marketing: It Works! Jumpstart Guide to Success - Promote, Prospect & Party (Network Marketing, MLM, It Works) Arbitrage: The authoritative guide on how it works, why it works, and how it can work for you Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II Sons of Privilege: The Charleston Light Dragoons in the Civil War (Civil War Sesquicentennial Edition) (Civil War Sesquicentennial Edition (University of South Carolina Press)) Korean Vignettes: Faces of War : 201 Veterans of the Korean War Recall That Forgotten War Their Experiences and Thoughts and Wartime Photographs of That Era War of the Worlds The Invasion From Mars (L.A. Theatre Works Audio Theatre Collection) Unicorns Are Jerks: A Coloring Book Exposing the Cold, Hard, Sparkly Truth Brain Game Sudoku Large Print: Easy, Medium to Hard Level Puzzles for Adult Sulution inside