Iman Mersal

“Mersal offers an exquisite daughter-to-father poem. Titled “The Clot,” this sequence radiates with a combination of tenderness, humor and anguish unmatched in contemporary Arabic poetry.”—From the Introduction by Khaled Mattawa

Selected Poems

These Are Not Oranges, My Love

Iman Mersal intricately weaves a new narrative of motherhood, moving between interior and exterior scapes, diaries, readings, and photographic representations of motherhood to question old and current representations of motherhood and the related space of unconditional love, guilt, personal goals and traditional expectations. What is hidden in narratives of motherhood in fictional and non-fictional texts as well as in photographs?0 0Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Motherhood and Its Ghosts

How to Mend

Robyn Creswell

Poems

The Threshold

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.”

Caminar cuanto sea posible : y otros poemas

Marwa Helal

Mirene Arsanios

Mona Kareem

Rachel Valinsky

Among a Sea of Influences

Fadhil al-Azzawi

Samir Abu Hawwash

Ines Abassi

Home: New Arabic Poems on Everyday Life, the second book in Two Lines Press's Calico series, explores the intimate world of everyday life, its agonies and delights, through the work of poets from Egypt, Palestine, Tunisia, Iraq, and more.

New Arabic Poems on Everyday Life

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Iman Mersal

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