Nine Parts looks like it might be really good:

A portrait of the extraordinary (and ordinary) lives of a whole cross-section of Iraqi women: a sexy painter, a radical Communist, doctors, exiles, wives and lovers. This work delves into the many conflicting aspects of what it means to be a woman in the age-old war zone that is Iraq. An unusually timely meditation on the ancient, the modern and the feminine in a country overshadowed by war.

I noted that the star of the show is, in fact, of Iraqi-American decent:

Originally from Michigan, Heather divides her time between New York and Los Angeles. Her father is from Iraq and her mother is American.

The reviews all seem to be favorable, like this one:

The birth of this play almost reads like poetry: In 1993, against the backdrop of gargantuan portraits of Saddam Hussein’s oppressive face, Raffo discovered in an art museum a painting of a nude woman against a barren tree. Her research revealed that the free-spirited and notorious artist Layla Attar had recently been killed in a bombing raid. Thus began a journey that brought her further into her homeland, back into the arms of her relatives and ultimately into the lives of the numerous Iraqi woman who form the backbone of the show. Some plays seem to slip out of a playwright; others clunk. The rare, exceptional ones seem to burst out as an intense gut reaction – Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire is such a play.

by Jimmy Carter (from the World of Poetry which also has a video of Carter reading his poem)

When I behold the charm
of evening skies, their lulling endurance;
the patterns of stars with names
of bears and dogs, a swan, a virgin;
other planets that the Voyager showed
were like and so unlike our own,
with all their diverse moons,
bright discs, weird rings, and cratered faces;
comets with their streaming tails
bent by pressure from our sun;
the skyscape of our Milky Way
holding in its shimmering disc
an infinity of suns
(or say a thousand billion);
knowing there are holes of darkness
gulping mass and even light,
knowing that this galaxy of ours
is one of multitudes
in what we call the heavens,
it troubles me. It troubles me.

A rather blistering critique of Carter’s poetry can be found in an old NYT review from 1995:

At first glance, the vocations of poet and politician might seem completely antithetical. Poetry, after all, requires subtlety, introspection and fidelity to language, qualities not exactly valued by most politicians. Oddly enough, in the case of former President Jimmy Carter, the very qualities that helped cripple him as a politician are also the qualities that make him a mediocre poet. […] What’s odd about these poems is that they give the reader plenty of information about Mr. Carter’s day-to-day experiences, while revealing little about his inner, imaginative life.

Although I can’t say Carter’s poems are as darkly disturbing as Hammarskjold’s, they certainly show the imbalance from a career politician’s self-doubt and constant search to find and placate the other side of reason.

Unfortunately I do not think the critic above understood his perspective at all. Subtlety, introspection and fidelity are in fact valued by most politicians.

The nature of winning support in general elections, building alliances, and negotiating tough terms for power perhaps should be considered before accusing a politician of lack of subtlety, introspection and above all, fidelity.