Despite years of war and tsunamis of sound bites, this will be the first opportunity many readers will have to meet Iraqis as real human beings, speaking heart to heart. In these pages are the unheard voices of Iraq: men and women, Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds. These poems were collected, as the war raged all around them, by Iraqis living and working in Baghdad. This is their message to the world, one that transcends all the barriers dividing present-day Iraq.