Plimsoll Lines

Plimsoll Lines are the marks on the side of a ship’s hull to which vessels can be safely loaded. These words become lyric and capture the “unbearable lightness” of the poetic word coupled with the playful metaphor of floating. Mounsef’s utilizes both these individual poems and the overall collection to drift the reader around themes of wandering, water, and wanting. The collection argues in favor of a return to the word and cultural meditations of language, politics, and the body in a world dominated by the visual and the mediated. Mounsef pushes past borders and combines the abstraction of French, the symbolism of Arabic, and the immediacy of English in a grand tour of the places that poetry can bring the reader.