About David Allen Sullivan
David Allen Sullivan is poet laureate of Santa Cruz County, California. His books include Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet (co-translated with Dr. Abbas Kadhim), and Black Ice. Take Wing won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize.
Praise for Black Butterflies Over Baghdad
For long-time fans of Sullivan’s poetry, like myself, you’ll find his signature lyric exploration of beauty within a troubled world. For those new to his work—here is a poet who refuses to turn away from a necessary poetic conversation that is both personal and global. With Black Butterflies Over Baghdad, we are given a world of voices, stories of olive groves and militias, loved ones turned to ash, wet gunpowder and oceans large enough to “erase/almost anything.” Sullivan listens across cultures and across languages in order to undo the erasures of time and power. He is generous and curious enough to invite poets into his work—into the meditation—so that he might collaborate with them. With many hands in the making this is a book of compassion and deep humanity.
—Brian Turner, Here, Bullet
Black Butterflies Over Baghdad depicts death flapping its wings over the city of Baghdad—the capital of Iraq, its beating heart—but those poetic flights radiate throughout Iraq, and into the wider world.
—Faleeha Hassan, Breakfast for Butterflies
These poems left me in a state of shock and awe: shocked by the terrible sufferings of the Iraqi people, and awed by the high and heart-breaking grace of the survivors who present them. The most resonant word in the poems is “blood,” not because it’s so often used, but because of its double meanings: the literal—the substance in all our veins that’s essential to life, and the figurative—“family,” which, I think, is the heart the whole collection wears on its metaphoric sleeve: that we are all, wherever we come from, family.
—Lola Haskins, Asylum
Black Butterflies Over Baghdad can be read, on one level, as archives of all that goes into destroying a country, of all that is left behind after the occupiers retreat. What remains are the poets, the artists, and those folks just trying to survive in this afterworld. With these generous, surprising, moving poems, David Allen Sullivan offers something of beauty from the wreckage.
—Nick Flynn, The Ticking Is the Bomb
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