November 9th: Iman Mersal in conversation with Robyn Creswell, moderated by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Iman Mersal will discuss her new book The Threshold: Poems with the book’s English translator, Robyn Creswell, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips
The live event will stream directly on this page on Wednesday, November 9th at 7 pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. If you have a question during the event, please email it to Evan@192Books.com.
Iman Mersal —The Threshold: Poems, translated from Arabic by Robyn Creswell
(Published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022)
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 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 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 is Assistant Professor of Comparative literature at Yale University. His research focuses on poetic modernisms in English, French, and Arabic. Other fields of interest include the intellectual history of the modern Middle East, theories and practices of translation, and contemporary poetry. Creswell is the translator of Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Clash of Images (New Directions, 2010) and The Tongue of Adam (New Directions, 2016), as well as Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell and Notes from Prison (New Directions, 2013). His essays and reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of numerous books, including most recently Living Weapon and The Circuit. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, and the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting. His translations from the Catalan have appeared widely. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and the poetry editor of The New Republic.