The Threshold

The Egyptian author Iman Mersal writes poetry and prose. As far as defining a practice, the division seems absolute: creativity, questions of form, and figures of speech on one side; facts, expositions, and lines of inquiry on the other. On the one hand, Mersal’s poems address everyday details and fragments of memory. She lingers on fathers and dubious friends, many former lovers, women and weather, hospital beds and city buses and hidden cafes.