The Threshold

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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.