Iman Mersal ist bekannt für ihre Gedichtsammlungen in arabischer Sprache, in denen sie Themen wie Identität und Entwurzelung erforscht. Ihr unverwechselbarer Stil zeichnet sich durch scharfe Beobachtung und eine einzigartige Perspektive auf die gegenwärtige Welt aus. Mit ihrer Arbeit hinterfragt Mersal konventionelle Vorstellungen und bietet den Lesern eine neue Sichtweise auf ihre Umgebung. Ihre Lyrik wird für ihre Sensibilität und literarische Kunstfertigkeit gelobt.
When Iman Mersal stumbles upon a great - yet forgotten - novel written by a young woman who killed herself shortly after her book was rejected by publishers, Mersal begins to research the writer. From archives, Enayat's writing and Mersal's own interviews and observations, a remarkable portrait emerges of a woman attempting to live independently.
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 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 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.”