Ouafa and Thawra: About a Lover from Tunisia

Book excerpt: "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