SWAN World

Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar

by El Habib LOUAI

ISBN : 978-2-849246-619-1

5 x 8" (13 x 20 cm)

78 pages

$14.00

El Habib Louai’s vigorous bittersweet poems are protests and meditations on the travails and luminous details of imprisonment -- literal, psychic, universal, -- with the hope that he will be able to play Thelonious Monk in incarceration. It is a timely powerful collection by a Moroccan poet and translator from the small Amazigh village who travels to the USA on the trail of experimental poetry’s trajectories.
--Anne Waldman, Poet, Writer, Professor, and Co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg

Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar is amazing! It gave me strength and energy, made me laugh, is so smart and genuine, your shining voice lighting the corners of each page! “O, Paul Klee” indeed, I think he would cherish these poems! This book revived originality, joy, gusto, energy, humor, hope!
--Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate, Poetry Foundation

Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar locates Moroccan poet El Habib Louai at the impossible crossroads of ancient Tamazight orality and contemporary USA underground poetics. That’s a perfect place to set free the imagination to roam from Omaha to Figuig. Here Ginsberg and O’Hara mix it up with Lalla Aicha, who was so kind to us, never heard any insults, she was deaf like a stone, and Bousslam, who passed away in his only djellaba, inherited from his blind grandfather. Open your eyes and ears to a truly global poet!
--Bob Holman, Spoken-word Poet, Arts Activist and Founder of the Bowery Poetry Club