Poetic Justice
Performance Studies Professor Deborah Kapchan's latest book "Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry" will be released this Spring.
Poetic Justice is the first anthology of contemporary Moroccan poetry in English. The work is primarily composed of poets who began writing after Moroccan independence in 1956 and includes work written in Moroccan Arabic (darija), classical Arabic, French, and Tamazight.
Why Poetic Justice? Moroccan poetry (and especially zajal, oral poetry now written in Moroccan Arabic) is often published in newspapers and journals and is thus a vibrant form of social commentary; what’s more, there is a law, a justice, in the aesthetic act that speaks back to the law of the land. Poetic Justicebecause literature has the power to shape the cultural and moral imagination in profound and just ways.