2Poetry. African & African American Studies. Translated by Peter Thompson. English speakers can now join Africans and Africa scholars in recognizing Abdellatif La�bi as Morocco's preeminent living poet. He is winner of France's Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix de La Francophonie, a poet who shares the stage with the best-selling novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun. This recognition has been an uncertain journey, first interrupted by imprisonment, then accelerated by great productivity in the years that La�bi has lived in France. La�bi's fame, and his troubles, grew in the 1960s when he founded the journal Souffles. It was, at first, a venue for Moroccan writers and not a forum for the politics that would attract the government's ire. When this journal, and the journal Anfas, became more political, La�bi was arrested in 1972. There are numerous allusions to his imprisonment and torture in the work.

PERISHABLE POEMS is a quiet volume, less suggestive and startling than receptive, like a fifty-eight year old man's reevaluation of life. These poems gently question the yield of disparate episodes in a long life, and of experiences more harrowing than most of us can understand. It has now been thirty-six years since La�bi�s release from prison, but the passions or that memory and the disappointments of Arab Spring still shine a light both human and harsh on authoritarianism, and on the life that flowers again after the cruelest repression.