Birhan Keskin

Birhan Keskin's Y'ol is a singular accomplishment, a book about desire and loss and craziness on a grand scale, the Turkish equivalent, perhaps, of something like Nicole Brossard's Mauve Desert.

Birhan Keskin's poetry is finely-honed and minimal and at the same time, powerfully visual, evocative and exact. Meaning and music overlap, lines dissolve, restart and repeat. Fluid and elusive, her poems inhabit a space between cognition and remembering, testimony and invention. This book selects work from six of Keskin's books, including her prize-winning collection Ba and George Messo's outstanding translation enables us to appreciate to the full the work of this exceptional poet.

Birhan Keskin's (b. Kirklareli, Turkey, 1963) poetry is finely-honed and minimal and at the same time, powerfully visual, evocative and exact. Meaning and music overlap, lines dissolve, restart and repeat. Fluid and elusive, her poems inhabit a space between cognition and remembering, testimony and invention. This book selects work from six of Keskin's books, including her prize-winning collection Ba, and George Messo's outstanding translation enables us to appreciate to the full the work of this exceptional poet.