We highlight 9 writers working in their heritage languages, from Galician and Cebuano to Guaraní and Kaaps.

Some of the animals here possess the power of speech, deploying it to often subversive ends.

I don’t live (t)here, but it lives in me still.

I shall tell you about one of the nitwits.

The contributors to our Queer issues produce narratives that elude facile compartmentalization.

He’s the third white soldier I’ve met this month.

In April 1991, Saddam Hussein took back control of his country in its entirety.

In the current environment of relentless political strife . . . debate deteriorates into name-calling; partisans morph into zealots, complex issues are reduced to binary terms, and hostility seethes just beneath the surface.

“They shoot them right outside their front door and then send their folks a bill for the bullets.”

Our hands could not grip anything as long as their hands gripped our lives.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m a medium who brings ghosts back from the past.”

The Iraqi love of water has inspired me to learn about the rivers of every city I visit.

The wearied ships land in its eyes

One day there will be no men

Words Without Borders introduces Manal Al-Sheikh and Mazen Maarouf, two poets living in exile in Scandinavia.

If one day you become a murderer, don't try to find out much about your victims.

I will make my skin your flag.

With the process of democratization the role of poetry has been curtailed.

My hair / Became a belt around the Earth’s waist.

Sorrow becomes my guest, in the square frame of my room

They locked him up for being a Kurd.

Say, after her death, we lit our epic poems on fire.

At that exact moment, more than sixty jets flew overhead.

The prolonged experience of war still dominates Iraqi articulations of self and place.

Wasn’t it your bloody rabbit that laid the egg?

Mules in this country had become conscientious objectors.

There’s no glory or holy symbolism in dying during warfare.

They were almost at Anwar’s house when the third bomb fell.

This is how our village acquired its own Rambo and Tarzan.

He lies silently and calmly in the hole, waiting for it to be filled in.

If you wish to sleep with me / In her dirt-filled arms

With my lips I can read / better than a blind man

She exploded, “So why isn’t she pregnant yet?

They know that if they enter the city, we’ll eat them alive.

Muhammad had returned from the dead, resurrected from the bones that had sunk in the well.

I have forged papers saying I am an aid worker.

Its wings two leaves / falling from heaven

Your body becomes my carry-on bag.

After reading Crime and Punishment when he was a student he had contemplated killing Umm Husayn.

He was arrested at the age of seventeen, released five years later, and executed when he was twenty-four.

My new position gave me contact with refugees from various communities in Copenhagen.

It took me some long months to realize that I was incarcerated.

Baghdad / I will divest you of your morgue

The holiday isolated the four friends, who had been thrown together, more than any ordinary day.

Or do we all, Baghdad, / belong to the executioner?

That the book that you were reading at your chair / is now opened again in the darkness

I remember that in 1967, when I was a child, only five years old, I told her about my fear-a strange thing; I don't know where it came from.

He told her, This amulet will set on fire any devil that dares approach you.

Now we begin the journey. Don't be shocked by the job I charge you with.

They are simple stories, most of which have nothing to do with blood or death or disappearance or mass graves. Rather they are gaunt like a body exhausted by disease, and describe the general situation in Iraq.

I thank everyone I don't love.

I was born in Basra many times, in all of the stories that I heard about it-in the stories which were told around me when I was a child, in the images I formed of it during my first trips there with my…

We stopped in five stations and did not leave a souvenir.We did not shiver there, or get drunk, or strum a guitar.Five rivers of sand on the guitar.Five crosses made of silence:You are sad;I wipe the…

Hold me, comfort meThe stones are nothing but pain tonightHold me to your breastso that I ramble:The stars are gray as ashand the road to themis ablaze with light.1993

A moment after midnightevery nightjazz begins to soak the Jazz Cornerlike new winelike village wineA moment after midnightevery nighta woman descends a dark staircaseto sing Brazilor balconies in candlelightor…