Winner of a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, “The War Works Hard” brings the Arabic poetry of Iraqi expatriate Dunya Mikhail into English in stunning, heartbreaking form by the translation alchemy of Elizabeth Winslow. Many of the poems have short, clipped line scans, suggesting that the speaker or narrator is in a hurry (in fact, one poem is entitled “I Was In a Hurry”) – perhaps escaping pursuers or bombs – or is shell shocked. At the same time, what emerges from the poems collectively is a sense of a person or persons finding the way to survive, get through horrific circumstances, retain dignity for themselves and lost loved ones, and eventually to build new lives out of the ruins.

From the poem “Bag of Bones”:

What good luck!
She has found his bones.
The skull is also in the bag
the bag in her hand
like all other bags
in all other trembling hands.
His bones, like thousands of bones
in the mass graveyard,
his skull, not like any other skull.