Proximal Morocco

Author: Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine Publisher: Ugly Duckling Press (2023) Originally published in 1975, Proximal Morocco—is a collection of poems by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine written in fits and starts during a span of 10 years (1964-1974), during the fever pitch of his political exile from his homeland of Morocco which he fled, partly for fear of political persecution and partly to pursue a literary career in Paris, France. Laced with the same politically-inflected Surrealistic fervor as Aimé Césaire, the book is at once a powerful outcry to fellow artists for international solidarity of the colonized and outcast and a documentation of the pain and struggle of exile. "Jake Syersak brings his translator’s bravura to bear on Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s guerrilla warfare with and against the French language. In a feat of lexical precision and alliterative cadences, a voice ‘composed in the likeness of thunder’ strives to ‘unlearn the viaticums of violence’. In rebellious screams and hallucinatory drea