You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
“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
To enter a collective archive is to carry an anonymous corpse on your shoulders. You are not investigating how this corpse met its death so much as feeling impelled, somehow, to fill in the gaps that render it anonymous. Whether or not you are hoping to tell the story and share it with others, you might be able to give this corpse a name and lend a meaning to its life. The corpse is the researcher's question. Urgent, mysterious, distorted or even inconsistent, it is a question that issues from the present-the here and now-but which lacks the language required to speak it.
From one of the preeminent poets of the Arab-speaking world, a brilliant work of creative nonfiction retracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature's tragic heroine. Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. For the next three decades, it's as if Enayat never existed at all. Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat's long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat. In this luminous biographical detective story, Mersal retraces E...
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.--
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 bod...
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.
None
In this collection of essays, various manifestations of traditional as well as modern and postmodern themes and techniques in Arabic literature are explored. For the first time the tripartite concepts of tradition, modernity, and postmodernity in Arabic literary works are analyzed in one volume.
This book, first ethnographic attempt, examines negated spaces, practices, and relationships that have been intentionally or unintentionally dismissed from academic and non-academic studies, articles, reports, and policy papers that investigate and debate the experiences of Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt. By taking the Coptic identity and faith to bars, liquor stores, coffeehouses, weed gatherings, prisons, casinos, night clubs, brothels, dating applications, and porn sites, this book argues that airing out this “dirty laundry” points to the limits of victimhood and activist narratives that shape the representation of Coptic grievances and interests on both national and internationa...
Exile and the Narrative/Poetic Imagination is a collection of essays examining a variety of narrative and poetic responses to exile. Intended to complement existing scholarship on exile, these essays discuss works from very different parts of the world, some of them relatively rarely studied through the lens of exile, including Armenia, Egypt, Tibet, and Liberia. The book is divided into five parts, each discussing different aspects of this condition such as feelings of loss and loneliness, memories of trauma, and the search for identity.