Ouafa and Thawra: About a Lover from Tunisia: Poetry, Drawings, Essay

By Arturo Desimone

"Ouafa and Thawra is a nomadic collection: well-travelled and restless, but with roots firmly in revolutionary Tunisia, a tumultuous country where people are sweet/ where even the hypocrisy is sweet. Arturo Desimone travels fearlessly between genres, too, with sketches deepening the reading experience and a postscript essay on Tunisia before and after the Arab Spring adding context to the poems (and offering the controversial but sound claim that the Arab Spring was catalysed by the events of 2003 in Iraq). Desimone is wholly original: his poems simultaneously draw on a breathtaking, freewheeling sense of linguistic innovation, and on a timeless well of imagery and mythology." - Jacob Silkstone, managing editor of Asymptote journal, co-founder of The Missing Slate

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Ltd
• Release date: Oct 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781779064882

Arturo Desimone

Arturo Desimone, Arubian-Argentinian writer and visual artist, was born in 1984 on the island Aruba which he inhabited until the age of 22, when he emigrated to the Netherlands. He relocated to Argentina while working on a long project about his Argentinean family background. Desimone's articles, poetry and fiction pieces have previously appeared in CounterPunch, Island. Círculo de Poesía (Spanish) Sydney Review of Books, Moko, The Missing Slate, Al Araby Al Jadeed (in Arabic translation) and New Orleans Review. He writes a blog about Latin American poetry for the Ex-Drunken Boat poetry review and performed in poetry festivals in Nicaragua, Cuba, Belgium and Argentina. He previously published the poetry collections Letters to Karl Marx/ Cartas a Carlos Marx *(2015) with Hanan Harawi, a publisher in Peru, and Poems of the Costa Nostra, Mare Nostrum (2019, publisher Hesterglock Protes(x)t, UK)

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