An impressionistic memoir by the award-winning Iraqi-American writer, Dunya Mikhail, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea covers her 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. 5 b&amp;w illustrations

Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (New Directions Paperbook)

Biographies & Memoirs

Mikhail, Dunya

Arts & Literature

New Directions

Collections 9-12 in New Directions' Poetry Pamphlet seriesThis bundle of four Poetry Pamphlets (9-12 in the series) includes:Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blasts Cries Laughter Osama Alomar's Fullblood Arabian Oliverio Girondo's Poems to Read on a StreetcarFifteen Iraqi Poets (edited by Dunya Mikhail)

Poetry Pamphlets 9-12 (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)

Literature & Fiction

FERLINGHETTI, LAWRENCE

Alomar, Osama

Girondo, Oliverio

Poetry

Collections 1-12 in New Directions' Poetry Pamphlet series
This boxed set of the first twelve collections in the New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series contains:
Osama Alomar's Fullbood Arabian H. D.'s Vale Ave Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blast Cries Laughter Forrest Gander's Eiko &amp; Koma Oliverio Girondo's Poems to Read on a Streetcar Susan Howe's Sorting Facts, or 19 Ways of Looking at Chris Marker Sylvia Legris's Pneumatic Antiphonal Bernadette Mayer's The Helens of Troy, New York Dunya Mikhail's 15 Iraqi Poets Alejandra Pizarnik's A Musical Hell Nathaniel Tarn's The Beautiful Contradictions Lydia Davis &amp; Eliot Weinberger's Two American Scenes

Poetry Pamphlets 1-12 (Boxed Set) (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)

Howe, Susan

Doolittle, Hilda

Tarn, Nathaniel

Weinberger, Eliot

Gander, Forrest

Davis, Lydia

Mayer, Bernadette

PIZARNIK, ALEJANDRA

Legris, Sylvia

A stunning new collection by one of Iraq’s brightest poetic voicesThe Iraqi Nights is the third collection by the acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. Taking The One Thousand and One Nights as her central theme, Mikhail personifies the role of Scheherazade the storyteller, saving herself through her tales. The nights are endless, seemingly as dark as war in this haunting collection, seemingly as endless as war. Yet the poet cannot stop dreaming of a future beyond the violence of a place where “every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun.” Unlike Scheherazade, however, Mikhail is writing, not to escape death, but to summon the strength to endure. Inhabiting the emotive spaces between Iraq and the U.S., Mikhail infuses those harsh realms with a deep poetic intimacy. The author’s vivid illustrations ― inspired by Sumerian tablets ― are threaded throughout this powerful book.

The Iraqi Nights (New Directions Paperbook)

History & Criticism

The true story of a beekeeper who risks his life to rescue enslaved women from Daesh
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 sexually abused, 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 own lives to save those of others.

The Beekeeper:Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq

Community & Culture

A brilliant poetic exploration of language and gender, place, and time, seen through the mirror of exile
In Her Feminine Sign follows on the heels of Dunya Mikhail's devastating account of Daesh kidnappings and killings of Yazidi women in Iraq, The Beekeeper. It is the first book she has written in both Arabic and English, a process she talks about in her preface, saying "The poet is at home in both texts, yet she remains a stranger." With a subtle simplicity and disquieting humor reminiscent of Wislawa Szymborska and an unadorned lyricism wholly her own, Mikhail shifts between her childhood in Baghdad and her present life in Detroit, between Ground Zero and a mass grave, between a game of chess and a flamingo. At the heart of the book is the symbol of the tied circle, the Arabic suffix taa-marbuta―a circle with two dots above it that determines a feminine word, or sign. This tied circle transforms into the moon, a stone that binds friendship, birdsong over ruins, three kidnapped women, and a hymn to Nisaba, the goddess of writing. A section of "Iraqi haiku" unfolds like Sumerian symbols carved onto clay tablets, transmuted into the stuff of our ordinary, daily life. In another poem, Mikhail defines the Sumerian word for freedom, Ama-ar-gi, as "what seeps out / from the dead into our dreams."

In Her Feminine Sign

"A bullet / then a siren / then ruins / then a bird song telling the truth"--Dunya Mikhail&nbsp; In her marvelous new poetry collection Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, Dunya Mikhail transforms the world's first symbols--Sumerian glyphs that were carved onto clay tablets--into the matter of our everyday contemporary life. Each of the ten sections in her book is composed of twenty-four short poems, and each poem combines both text and drawing. In her note to the collection, Mikhail writes, "I practiced at least two layers of translation in these tablets: the first from words in one language, Arabic, to another, English; and the second from words to images. What I received from my ancestors are offerings of the future rather than of the past. Now it's my turn to offer them to you."

Tablets: Secrets of the Clay

The teachers’ guide for Arabic 1 and Arabic 2 sets out the World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages and provides goals for teachers to help students achieve these standards. It also contains additional exercises for those students looking to further hone their Arabic language skills outside of the textbooks.

Arabic 1 and 2 Teachers’ Guide

Hassan, Wafa

McBroom, Kathleen

Michigan State University Press

A powerful and sweeping novel set over two tumultuous decades in Iraq from the National Book Award-nominated author of The Beekeeper.\nShortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.\nHelen 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.\nHelen 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.\nShe 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?\nFor 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.

The Bird Tattoo: A Novel

United States

Pegasus Books

In The Beekeeper of Sinjar, the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail tells the harrowing stories of women from across Iraq who have managed to escape the clutches of ISIS. Since 2014, ISIS has been persecuting the Yazidi people, killing or enslaving those who won't convert to Islam. These women have lost their families and loved ones, along with everything they've ever known. Dunya Mikhail weaves together the women's tales of endurance and near-impossible escape with the story of her own exile and her dreams for the future of Iraq. 
In the midst of ISIS's reign of terror and hatred, an unlikely hero has emerged: the Beekeeper. Once a trader selling his mountain honey across the region, when ISIS came to Sinjar he turned his knowledge of the local terrain to another, more dangerous use. Along with a secret network of transporters, helpers, and former bootleggers, Abdullah Shrem smuggles brutalised Yazidi women to safety through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Western Turkey. 
This powerful work of literary nonfiction offers a counterpoint to ISIS's genocidal extremism: hope, as ordinary people risk torture and death to save the lives of others.

Beekeeper Of Sinjar

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Serpent's Tail

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