Words fly away

This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

"My book is a celebration of the enduring power of human expression. Despite efforts to suppress ideas by burning books that hold the ideas, the words carrying the ideas will always escape and live on. As first century AD Rabbi Akiba says, 'The pages burn, but the words fly away.' My book focuses on the word 'word' written in 44 languages, as we see the words fly away. They are accompanied by iridescent butterflies which guard the words' flight into a new form. In much smaller print is a listing of book burnings, ending with the latest in Mali, in 2013. The burnings are minimized by the glorious flight of enduring words"--The Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.