In Her Feminine Sign

Dunya Mikhail

From Shelf: poetry to make the world stop turning for a second

A brilliant poetic exploration of language and gender, place and time, through the mirror of exile.

A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2019 Wild Card Selection At the heart of In Her Feminine Sign, Dunya Mikhail's luminous new collection of poems, is the Arabic suffix taamarbuta, `the tied circle' - a circle with two dots above it that indicates a feminine word, or sign. This tied circle transforms into the moon, a stone that binds friendship, birdsong over ruins, and a hymn to Nisaba, the goddess of writing. With a deceptive simplicity and disquieting humour reminiscent of Wislawa Szymborska, and a lyricism wholly her own, Mikhail slips between her childhood in Baghdad and her present life in Detroit, between Ground Zero and a mass grave, tracing new circles of light.

Bookhaus is selling this book

£10.99 (New)

Add to bag