Khumásiyát

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.