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 Laâbi'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.

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