"Public life in twentieth-century Iraq was thoroughly colored by the contexts, conventions, and critiques of poetic performances. Kevin Jones offers for the first time in English a cogent account of the modern literary giants—such as Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri and Muhammad Salih Bahr al-'Ulum—whose compositions and performances electrified publics and created a unique language for a range of political movements and situations. <i>The Dangers of Poetry</i> is a valuable contribution to our understandings of the social and cultural history of modern Iraq."—Elliott Colla, Georgetown University
"Through beautiful translations and insightful commentary, <i>The Dangers of Poetry</i> demonstrates how poetic works expressed the hopes, desires, and anxieties of colonized subjects, from tribal landscapes to prison cells. This perceptive book is a welcome addition to recent scholarship on cultures and poetics in Ottoman, Arab, and Persian societies, and will interest all those concerned with non-Western modernities and anticolonial resistance."—Orit Bashkin, University of Chicago