Tablets: Secrets of the Clay

A gorgeous fusion of poetry and image by one of the foremost poets of our time (The Christian Science Monitor).A bullet / then a siren / then ruins / then a bird song telling the truthDunya MikhailIn her marvelous new poetry collection Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, Dunya Mikhail transforms the worlds first symbolsSumerian glyphs that were carved onto clay tabletsinto 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 its my turn to offer them to you.