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 Justice because literature has the power to shape the cultural and moral imagination in profound and just ways.

Reading this oeuvre from independence until the new millennium and beyond, it is clear that what poet Driss Mesnaoui calls the “letters of time” have long been in the hands of Moroccan poets, as they write their ethics, their aesthetics, as well as their gendered and political lives into poetic being.

Deborah Kapchan’s Taking Leave is a lyrical memoir that encompasses journeys both inner and outer, physical and spiritual. Taking readers from New York, Paris, and Casablanca to Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi while exploring her Christian childhood, Jewish lineage, and the release she found in Islam, Kapchan examines the extent to which we can take leave of who we are to live between categories. She meditates on absence, presence, and the sublime to weave an existential tale that honors the three traditions that made her, ultimately desiring to take leave of them all. Taking Leave is an urgent plea for anti-tribalism and a timely treatise for compassionate coexistence in the spaces in-between.