The Threshold by Iman Mersal

A selection of luminous, fiercely intelligent verse from Egypt's premier
poet.
Iman Mersal is Egypt's - 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 boheme, a home for Lovers of cheap weed 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 smell 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 illuminates the trials of displacement and migration, as well
as the risks of crossing boundaries, personal and political, in literature and in
life.
The Threshold gathers poems from Mersal's first four collections of poetry: A
Dark Alley Suitable for Dance Lessons (1995), Walking as Long as Possible
(1997), Alternative Geography (2006), and Until I Give Up the Idea of Home
(2013). Taken together, these works chart a poetic itinerary from defiance and
antagonism to the establishment of a new, self-created sensibility. At their
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."
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 (...)

Iman Mersal is the author of several books of poems and a collection of
essays, How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts . In English translation, her
poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books,
The Nation, and other publications. Her most recent prose work, Traces of
Enayat, received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Literature in 2021. She is
a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Alberta,
Canada.
Robyn Creswell is a consulting editor for poetry at Farrar, Straus and Giroux

arrar, Straus and Giroux
On Sale: Oct 10/23
5.38 x 8.25 • 128 pages
9780374607852 • $23.00 • pb
Poetry / Middle Eastern