Overview

Khumásiyát: Poems from the Moroccan Desert is a collection of poems inspired by the traditions of the Ait Khabbash Imazighen (""Berbers"") of southeastern Morocco and the Saharan landscape they inhabit. Each poem contains the same 125 key words. To compose these poems, the poet wrote 125 words on separate slips of paper, drew them randomly from a basket, and strung together into lines of five key words each, sometimes into five-lined stanzas, or quintains-hence the name khumásiyát, Arabic for a form containing ""five""-to form poems 25 lines long. The familiar words recombine into different groups, with different syntax and grammar, to form imagistic relationships that are surprising and new.

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Yahya Frederickson's books include In a Homeland Not Far: New & Selected Poems (Press 53, 2017), The Gold Shop of Ba-'Ali (Lost Horse, 2014), and four earlier chapbooks, including The Birds of al-Merjeh Square: Poems from Syria (Finishing Line, 2014). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, RHINO, The Southern Review, Witness, and elsewhere. He's a professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead, on Dakota and Anishinaabe lands.

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