Compelling poems from one of the most prolific and critically acclaimed of contemporary North African writers. Imprisoned for many years by the Moroccan authorities, Laâbi's poetry is haunted by memories of torture and prisons and bears witness to his preoccupations with — and resistance to — the growing international sickness of state-supported inhumanity.

The present volume consists of poems selected by Laâbi from works published in French over the past ten years and includes a generous selection of recent work where he varies the tone and subject and the diction of his poetic projects, and moves with ease from the elegiac to the whimsical, for example, and from the personal to the proverbial.

Abdellatif Laâbi was born in 1942 in Fez. In 1966 he founded the avant-garde literary and artistic journal Souffles, which helped spark a literary and artistic renaissance throughout North Africa. Imprisoned for seven years in the ’70s for his political beliefs and his writings, he has lived in Paris since 1985. His latest book, a novel, will be published this year by Gallimard.