[10/14/25] Keskin, Birhan / Tekten, Öykü (tr.): Earthly Conditions

World Poetry, paperback

Publication Date: October 14, 2025

Publisher Marketing: A representative selection of acclaimed Turkish poet Birhan Keskin's work, Earthly Conditions explores the loss and longing of the human condition in the context of its separation from the non-human world. Keskin’s ability to shift voices between seemingly distinct subjectivities creates a rich texture and an ambiguity that sits at the heart of her poetry. This poetry is often autobiographical, but the “I” of these poems is merged with non-human voices—stones, penguins, oceans, trees, glaciers, among others—in a way that might be termed organic. Each poem in the book opens the door to introspection in an aching search for wholeness. Although Keskin has been a major voice in the Turkish literary scene since the 1980s, she does not publish often because, as she puts it, “writing too many poems is a betrayal of both words and trees.”

“I’m a gone and committed fan. These verses are dirty like the road of love.” —EILEEN MYLES

“Earthly Conditions brings us to the elemental and tender mechanisms of primordial telluric power co-existing in a biosphere commanded by noise, greed, ego. What a graceful yet seismic poet! Keskin is entangled in a poetry that never wavers, carrying us through the ‘womb of the world’ towards a dense sulfur ‘tuff’ and in a sense moves mountains as a shaman might, in a fragile circle of curing, cleansing, defying. I am moved knowing the work of this Turkish writer at long last, who identifies and shapeshifts with consorts of spiders, seeds, flamingos, parched leaves in childlike clarity and curiosity: ‘Roses were planted in the earth / who planted my blood?’” —ANNE WALDMAN

“What does a penguin think? A spider feel? How might a glacier remember the world? Coming down mountains, out of oceans, from anthills or the underside of a leaf, Earthly Conditions offers us new intimacies with which to sense the non-human choruses that braid, encircle, and co-constitute the limited human scene (‘what’s a person but a whim in this world?’ the desert asks). Practicing maximal attention, subtly querying various morphisms, these poems re-enchant our most vital exchanges—’you are in a dream, hea, you are the dream.’ Drawing from five of Keskin’s previous books, Öykü Tekten’s marvelous translations give English language poetry and its readers a vivid and profound poet whose exquisite naturalisms we’d do well to heed.” —HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL