I Drag My Sorrow by His Collar

A debut collection in English by an Arabic poet whose prose poems engage with what it’s been like to be a woman and live in Iraq during the last two decades, particularly amid battles with the Islamic State and other dangerous entities.

I Drag My Sorrow by His Collar is Iraqi poet Hanaa Ahmad Jabr’s first solo collection in English, following the release of her celebrated, collaborative, bilingual collection Where do you live? أين تعيشين؟. In her astonishing new book, Jabr excavates the years she survived Iraq’s endless battles with the Islamic State and other nefarious forces.

Jabr’s prose poems, what readers of English would call free verse, often seem starkly sensual and relational, though the featured “he” may mean the “homeland” or “Mosul” itself, which betrays its “lovers” with a lust for war. Hands, tea, refusals, betrayals, loneliness, and the scent of jasmine: these themes, and more, are revisited, teased out, plumbed, and spun around by a singular, penetrating personality.