Dunya Mikhail is a woman who speaks like the disillusioned goddesses of Babylon. Blunt as well as subtle, she makes of war a distinct entity, thus turning it into a myth. To her own question, ‘What does it mean to die all this death?,’ her poems answer that it means to reveal the only redeeming power that we have: the existence of love.

The dead have words, because Mikhail has written them.

Mikhail sings of the longing and undoing of exile, mourns the loss of her language, describes its gendering and the re-engineering on her tongue, a poet’s most important muscle. Delicate, beautiful, day-stopping.

This refreshing volume expands poetry’s definition with white space that gives breath to moving hand-drawn images and their accompanying poems… Shadows, vases, music—the simplest experiences extend and challenge in Mikhail’s hands.

'Poetry is how the fish discovers / The third shore of the river.’ Tablets: Secrets of the Clay takes us to that third shore, honors our losses, and releases them to swim in eternal waters.