Authors: Peter Cole and Iman Mersal (Virtual)

If only this evening could be staged in the same room, as we range around a good part of the world in hosting three poets – Peter Cole and Iman Mersal virtually at 5 p.m. – and another, Naveen Kishore in store at 7 p.m. Between them, the U.S., Israel/Palestine, Egypt, Canada, and India, with their poetic and literary concerns extending beyond whatever borders those nationalities might pose. This 5 p.m virtual program returns poet/translator/editor Peter Cole to Elliott Bay to read from his newest collection, Draw Me After (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and it helps introduce an overdue major collection of one of the world’s major poets, Iman Mersal with her new book, The Threshold (translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell / Farrar, Straus & Giroux). 

Peter Cole’s Draw Me After very much has ‘drawing’ in it, with work by Terry Winters, which he dares from, so to speak.
“‘Waking the letters from their slumber’: that’s Peter Cole’s mad, sublime task in these phantasmagoric poems. Every line of this book breaks the literal—the letters—into visionary scenes where sorrow marries joy and blessings almost rhyme with curse. A revelation.” —Rosanna Warren.
“Peter Cole shows himself in Draw Me After to be our great master of ekphrasis. Visually, sonically, rhythmically, semantically, his are some of the most inventive, witty, profound, and genuinely beautiful lyric poems of our moment.” —Marjorie Perloff.
Peter Cole has written several previous books of poems, including Hymns & Qualms and Rift, and he has also translated widely from Hebrew and Arabic works—both medieval and modern. With Adina Hoffman, he has co-written Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza and also published books as Ibis Editions. He is the recipient of many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a National Jewish Book Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven. 

Joining us, we believe, from Edmonton, where she is a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Alberta is Iman Mersal. The Threshold, translated by Robyn Creswell, draws from several of her noted earlier books of poetry ranging back nearly thirty years and coming up to the present – A Dark Alley Suitable for Dance Lessons, Walking as Long as Possible, Alternative Geography, and Until I Give Up the Idea of Home. Her most recent book, the prose work Traces of Enayat (all of these, we’re giving translated titles), received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Literature in 2021.
“The publication of Iman Mersal’s The Threshold is a major literary event. Long recognized throughout the Arab world and in Europe, Mersal is one of the strongest confessional (or postconfessional) poets we now have, in any language: her poems are fueled by a mordant wit, sensual vibrancy, and feminist brio. Impatient with pieties—whether political, erotic, or poetic—she writes, like Louise Glück, with emotional intensity and analytic coolness. This is poetry of earned and perfect pitch: the notations of an impassioned mind. I read The Threshold straight through; it will become a permanent companion.” —Maureen N. McLane. “Undeceived, ironic, daring, Iman Mersal’s poems are animated by a singular sensibility. They deal candidly with real life—migration, dying parents, emotional entanglements—and discover general truths among the fine particulars. Robyn Creswell’s translation is deft and subtle, and the Anglophone world is lucky to have it.” —Nick Laird.

Peter Cole and Iman MersalTuesday Nov 29 2022 5:00pm – 6:00pm

Virtually Hosted by Elliott Bay Book Company.

Registration/Information