Poetry. African & African American Studies. Translated from the Arabic by Peter Thompson. From the Foreword: "Can a poem (or a book--for this is a book-length poem) be topical and at the same time make you lose your bearings? Can it refer to current events and also entertain its own event--the unpredictable reactions in its own crucible? No mistake: Loakira's poem is about Arab Spring. But the power of his images shifts the reader from the uneasy Maghreb cities and onto another scene: the breaking and making, the revolts and improbable successes of poetry.

If you have lived through the tensions of Arab Spring, if your king has made adjustments (2011) to the Constitution--thus avoiding full-scale unrest--and if you've seen the insurgents and the cafe-bombs over the years, along with the repressions, how much do you owe to the topic (you the writer who deals with truth), and how much do you owe to the poetry that inheres in raw and visionary revolt? With Loakira both axes are operative, but the plain facts of Arab Spring act on us only to the extent that we are informed. His primary avenue to the truth of this era is instead metaphorical allusion--even while that allusion is crafted from the plain facts."