Ugly Duckling Presse, paperback
Publication Date: March 1, 2023
Publisher Marketing: A collection of visceral, anti-colonial poetry from the Maghreb region of North Africa that is as indebted to Surrealism as it is to Negritude.
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.
"Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine is a poetic force, and Jake Syersak's unrelenting, uncompromising translation brings one of his most alive books crashing into English 'in the likeness of thunder.'"-- Emma Ramadan