What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human states – metaphorically called death's shadow or considered the very pinnacle of indolence – be envisioned as action and agency? And what do we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves...

Iraqi poet Salah Al Hamdani has lived a remarkable life. The author of some forty books in French and Arabic, he began life as a child laborer, with little or no education. As a political prisoner under Saddam Hussein, he learned to read and write Ar...