Threshold

Mersal, Iman

ISBN 10: 0374607850 / ISBN 13: 9780374607852

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

About this Item

2023 stated 1st paperback edition warmly inscribed (which always means to a particular person) by the author (with a few words in Egyptian) on the half title page in 2025. Light denting/curling on the top fore-edge of front cover and first 12 pages, else fine.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1746120766016

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Threshold
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374607850
• ISBN 13: 9780374607852
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Inscribed by Author

About this title

Synopsis

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.”

About the Authors

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 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 and is a former poetry editor of The Paris Review. He teaches Arabic literature at Yale University.