EBOOK
About
A selection of luminous, fiercely intelligent verse from Egypt's premier poet.
Iman Mersal is Egypt's-and indeed the Arab world's-great outsider poet. Over the past three decades, she has crafted a voice that is ferocious and tender, street-smart and vulnerable. Her early work captures the energies of Cairo's legendary literary bohème, peopled by "Lovers of hashish and awkward confessions / Anti-state agitators" and "People like me." These are poems of wit and rage, freaked by moments of sudden beauty, like "the scent of guava" mysteriously wafting through the City of the Dead. Other poems bear witness to agonizing loss and erotic temptation, "the breath of two bodies that never had enough time / and so took pleasure in their mounting terror." Mersal's most recent work addresses itself to the traumas of displacement and migration, as well as the pleasure of crossing boundaries, personal and political, in literature and in life.
The Threshold gathers poems from Mersal's first four collections of poetry: Dark Alley Suitable for Dance Lessons (1995), Walking as Long as Possible (1997), An Alternate Geography (2006), and Until I Renounce the Idea of Houses (2013). Taken together, these works chart a poetic itinerary, from defiance and antagonism to the establishment of a new, self-created sensibility. At its center is the poet: indefatigably intelligent, funny, flawed, and impossible to pin down. As she writes, "I'm pretty sure / my self-exposures / are for me to hide behind."
Iman Mersal is Egypt's-and indeed the Arab world's-great outsider poet. Over the past three decades, she has crafted a voice that is ferocious and tender, street-smart and vulnerable. Her early work captures the energies of Cairo's legendary literary bohème, peopled by "Lovers of hashish and awkward confessions / Anti-state agitators" and "People like me." These are poems of wit and rage, freaked by moments of sudden beauty, like "the scent of guava" mysteriously wafting through the City of the Dead. Other poems bear witness to agonizing loss and erotic temptation, "the breath of two bodies that never had enough time / and so took pleasure in their mounting terror." Mersal's most recent work addresses itself to the traumas of displacement and migration, as well as the pleasure of crossing boundaries, personal and political, in literature and in life.
The Threshold gathers poems from Mersal's first four collections of poetry: Dark Alley Suitable for Dance Lessons (1995), Walking as Long as Possible (1997), An Alternate Geography (2006), and Until I Renounce the Idea of Houses (2013). Taken together, these works chart a poetic itinerary, from defiance and antagonism to the establishment of a new, self-created sensibility. At its center is the poet: indefatigably intelligent, funny, flawed, and impossible to pin down. As she writes, "I'm pretty sure / my self-exposures / are for me to hide behind."
Related Subjects
Reviews
"The first new poems I've liked for years . . .Unpredictable, savage, chaotic. There is something of Zbigniew Herbert in them, clever, abstract, musing stuff, but they are this year's model, an 'upgrade,' as we would say, with terrifying bleakness in place of his periodic geniality."
Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement
"Mersal doesn't offer herself as a representative of her country, culture, or religion, and her feminism manifests not as a creed but as a tone, a disposition toward life and love. Her voice is so inviting, so familiar, so confiding that it's even easy to forget that these are translations: Creswell renders her as a perfect contemporary . . . To read The Threshold is to be heartened by poem after
heart and mind, candor and cunning."
"[Mersal's poetry] is bracing, clever, and terse, but slippery too. The self is not her subject so much as an impediment that she writes around; there's deceit, disloyalty, duplicity, misdirection . . . There is an almost joyful sense of privacy in Mersal's poems: She obscures as much as she discloses."
Amir-Hussein Radjy, The Nation