The Threshold: Poems

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 bohème, 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.＂

Iman Mersal is the author of five 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 teaches comparative literature at Yale University and is a consulting editor for poetry at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut and contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books.