Photo © Robert Akrawi
Mikhail has created a searing portrait of courage, humanity and savagery, told in a mosaic of voices.”
New York Times Book Review, Deborah Campbell
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“This book makes a sound, and it should be a loud one.”
The Guardian, Peter Stanford
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“The Beekeeper is a brutally important, electrifying, and lyrical true story.”
Foreword, Paige Van De Winkle
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“It’s a remarkable, winding work that ascends into dream visions and crawls through gory particulars of war. A child’s perspective mingles freely with the poet’s mature voice, both baffled by the paradoxes of so much beauty and so much destruction.”
The Washington Post, Ron Charles |
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“Stark and poignant, Mikhail’s poems give voice to an often buried, glossed-over or spun grief.”
Publishers Weekly |
“Powerful, urgent.”
Kirkus Review |
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“Mikhail’s work is emotionally uplifting. Her style mentions an impressive fragility and delicacy of image that touches the reader’s heart. Indeed, her trademark utmost lucidity of picture is tinged by a radiance of tone that we feel unmistakably spills over from the original language.”
American Poetry Review, Laurence Lieberman |
[Mikhail is] a poet who can take a subject as difficult as the death of a child and write, counter to the human-interest story or sound bite, a poem that will outlast the exigencies of the present.”
Boston Review, Susan Barba |
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“Mikhail’s poetry- so pure and beautiful- is the best of her generation.”
Fadhil Al-Azzawi, Iraqi poet |
“Shakespeare would have enjoyed the poetry of Dunya Mikhail who has spoken of love as a response to a war-torn world – an aesthetic, a value, and a practice.”
The Christian Science Monitor, Elizabeth Toohey, |
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“Dunya Mikhail combines the authenticity of witness to global events with the essential poetic virtue of wit.”
New Letters, Robert Stewart |
“There is no current voice that speaks on war through poetry more candidly, effectively, and beautifully than Dunya Mikhail.”
Parkview magazine, Ronald Grant |
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“In Her Feminine Sign is a collection of limpid meditations which demand that we pause as we read. Their stillness and clarity is no miniaturised charm. Instead it’s an utterly articulate clear-sightedness that lets each one deliver a shock. The tragedies of recent and not so recent Iraqi history and the traditions of Arabic verse are the steely structures that underpin her profoundly thought-through work of witness.”
The Guardian, Fiona Sampson |
—The New York Times “New & Noteworthy” |
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—Barbara Berman, The Rumpus |
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—Etel Adnan |
—Marilyn Hacker |
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—John Freeman, LitHub |
“Here is the new Iraqi poetry: a poetry of urgency that has no time for the traditional (in Arab poetry) flowers of rhetoric; terse, unadorned, stripped & ironic, Dunya Mikhail’s lines move at the speed of events–be it war or love. Here the fierceness of the public life meshes with the hard-won tenderness of the private, in a passionate dialectic that makes her voice the inescapable voice of Arab poetry today.”
Pierre Joris |
“The stories in The Beekeeper are reminiscent of tales of escapees on the US’s Underground Railroad of the mid-1800s or during the Holocaust. The book is a paean for coexistence in a multiethnic, multi-religious, multilingual Iraq. Powerful and difficult.”
—M. Lynx Qualey, The National