This paper explores trends in Iraqi poetry after Iraq’s two late twentieth-century wars in the Gulf, the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and the Gulf War (1990-1991). In this paper, I argue that the Iraqi cultural scene has been impacted by the Gulf Wars, resulting in a change of Iraqi position in the map of Arabic literature after being a pioneer in the second half of the twentieth century with the rise of the free verse movement in Iraq and its immense influence on Arabic poetry. Like all aspects of life, Iraqi poetry was influenced by the turmoil of the period after the Gulf War and the UN sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s. Moreover, it was a moment in the history of Iraqi poetry that witnessed significant changes of style and form. In the 1990s, young Iraqi poets looked for alternative ways of expression. For example, a poetry festival held in Baghdad in 1992 celebrated prose poetry as a new form of expression, but also indirectly as a new form of subversion and indirect opposition to the rule of tyranny. The UN sanctions broke both the Iraqi economy and Iraq’s links with the regional area which had been a major connection in creative writing and innovation in the previous decades. Iraq’s connections to the Gulf in the 1940s were among the key influences that led to the new free verse movement in Iraqi and Arabic poetry in general. Pioneers such as Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab had found a shelter in the Gulf press. Kuwait, for example, acted as his final nursing destination before his death, after being denied this in Iraq and elsewhere in the world because of his political opinions. However, by the 1990s, Iraqi poets found themselves under an unyielding detachment from their regional surroundings. As a consequence, they articulated an expression of isolation and nihilism that unveiled a subversive, depressed, and destroyed generation whose major subjects were war, violence, cruelty, tyranny, and cultural oppression. This paper uses sources from published poems by Iraqi poets in literary magazines outside Iraq such as Al Ightirab aladabi in London (1998) where the poems were sent; interviews with some of the poets who agreed to talk about their experience; and archived books that were secretly published through the photocopying technique in few circulated copies in the 1990s by the poets themselves to write manifestos of the their new poetry.