Dalglish apela a la polisemia de los vocablos sumerios y, en una hermosísima prosa poética, ofrece su versión sin traicionar ni la linealidad narrativa principal ni su textura tropológica, fijadas originalmente en una escritura cuneiforme. Según lo sabido hasta hoy, fue el primer texto literario en la historia firmado por su autor, y lo firmó una mujer. Dalglish apela a la polisemia de los vocablos sumerios y, en una hermosísima prosa poética, ofrece su versión sin traicionar ni la linealidad narrativa principal ni su textura tropológica, fijadas originalmente en una escritura cuneiforme. Según lo sabido hasta hoy, fue el primer texto literario en la historia firmado por su autor, y lo firmó una mujer.
—Dr. Rogelio Rodríguez Coronel, Profesor, Facultad de Artes y Letras, Universidad de La Habana. Director, Academia Cubana de la Lengua
<em>Humming the Blues</em> represents an astoundingly bold and daring poetic project—original, ambitious, effective, and hugely creative. Dalglish carries us in leaps across time, cultures, languages, and writing systems to open the cuneiform hymn of Sumerian Princess-Priestess Enheduanna to us, twenty-first century readers…
—Juanita Garciagodoy, Digging the Days of the Dead: A Reading of Mexico’s Dias De Muertos
Concurrently the newest and the oldest ecstatic poetry in the history of the written word, this inspired book of verse adaptations by Cass Dalglish pulses with energy, throbs with archetypal imagery and contemporary rhythms, leaves me breathless.
—Ingrid Wendt, Oregon Book Award Recipient, Singing the Mozart Requiem
These poems, lapis blue and saffron-perfumed, come through Cass Dalglish from ancient Enheduanna in the voice of a sister who carries ruined roses and woe across many centuries to stand against the ransacking of sacred places, to confront terror with a woman’s strongest weapon: the force of life.
—Heid E. Erdrich, The Mother’s Tongue
Cass Dalglish’s brilliant excavation and restoration of the life and work of an ancient woman, who was a great leader, resonates now. It is powerfully affirming.
—Carol Connolly, former Poet Laureate, St. Paul, MN
<em>Humming the Blues</em> gives us a feminist riff on an old story of destruction and rebirth… an amalgam of poetry and poetics, jazz, and the ancient Sumerian celebratory poem of lnanna’s return.
—Cary Waterman, The Salamander Migration
With great care and great abandon, Cass Dalglish brings us story-song-poems that hopscotch from our present moment all the way back to ancient Sumer and return to us as ‘fresh interpretations to familiar songs.’
—Rachel Zucker, The Bad Wife’s Handbook
Dalglish, in a voice she builds from translating and contemplating cuneiform signs made by Enheduanna, brings to life Enheduanna’s power, her forced exile, and her belief in the god and judge lnanna, a god in heaven and on earth…
—Deborah Keenan, Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems
This bold arrangement by Cass Dalglish of <em>Nin-me-šar-ra</em> makes the original composition by Enheduanna resonate anew across forty-three centuries.
—Fran Hazelton, Stories from Ancient Iraq, The Enheduanna Society
Cass Dalglish throws the five thousand year old cuneiform pictographs onto the page with the masterful skill of Pollock, revealing the priestesses’ gasps, sighs, squiggles, howls and roars… matching the depths and intensity of its content: darkness and rebirth. Crucial to be read in our times.
—Diane Wolkstein, Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer
There’s nothing quite like <em>Humming the Blues</em>.
—Eloise Klein Healy, The Islands Project: Poems for Sapho
