About this item
A brilliant poetic exploration of language and gender, place, and time, seen through the mirror of exileIn 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.
About the Author
Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi-American writer. Her honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kresge Fellowship, Arab American Book Award, Griffin shortlist, and UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of writing. Renowned for her subversive, innovative, and satirical poetry, Mikhail speaks about her experiences growing up in a war-torn country, sleeping on the roof of her family's home during the sweltering summers until the air raid sirens sounded. In an interview with NPR, Mikhail said, "I still feel that poetry is not medicine--it's an X-ray. It helps you see the wound and understand it. We all feel alienated because of this continuous violence in the world. We feel alone, but we feel also together. So we resort to poetry as a possibility for survival. However, to say I survived is not so final. We wake up to find that the war survived with us."
