The Iraqi Nights by Dunya Mikhail and translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

This is poetry from Iraq.

The Iraqi Nights by Dunya Mikhail translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid is published by New Directions Publishing Corporation. This is a Book originally written in Arabic. This was published in 2014.0 and has the ISBN of 9.78081122286E12.

The Iraqi Nights, by Dunya Mikhail and translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid from Arabic, brings Arabic-language poetry from Iraq into English through Dunya Mikhail’s nocturnal Iraq, fable-like clarity, and the poem as a lantern lit inside catastrophe. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for night, war, tale, and the strange tenderness that can survive in stripped, almost story-like speech, not as a fixed lesson about Iraq. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. The Iraqi Nights belongs in the translated poetry library because it gives contemporary Iraqi poetry one of its most memorable English-language doorways.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.