Birhan Keskin - Earthly Conditions
Birhan Keskin
Earthly Conditions: Selected Poems
Translated from Turkish by
ÖYKÜ TEKTEN
Bilingual Edition
September 30, 2025
BIOS
BIRHAN KESKIN is a Turkish poet and editor. She graduated from Istanbul University with a degree in sociology. Her first poems began to appear in 1984. In the late 1990s, she was joint editor of the literary magazine Göçebe. She has since worked as an editor for a number of prominent publishing houses in Istanbul. She is the author of nine books of poetry, and previous English translations include her book-length cycle Y'ol (Spuyten Duyvil), and the selected volume & Silk & Love & Flame (Arc Publications). Keskin is the recipient of Turkey's prestigious Golden Orange Award and the Metin Altıok Poetry Prize.
ÖYKÜ TEKTEN is a poet, translator, archivist, and editor. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo Press, an art and publishing experience with a particular focus on work in and about translation, and a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. She is the co-translator of İlhan Sami Çomak’s Separated from the Sun (Smokestack Books) and the translator of Betül Dünder’s Selected Poems (Belladonna*). She is the general editor of the Kurdish Poetry Series for Pinsapo Press, as well as a co-editor of the annual Best Literary Translations anthology from Deep Vellum.
Birhan Keskin
Earthly Conditions: Selected Poems
Translated from Turkish by
ÖYKÜ TEKTEN
The first representative selection of acclaimed Turkish poet Birhan Keskin’s work to be published in the US, 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
BIOS
BIRHAN KESKIN is a Turkish poet and editor. She graduated from Istanbul University with a degree in sociology. Her first poems began to appear in 1984. In the late 1990s, she was joint editor of the literary magazine Göçebe. She has since worked as an editor for a number of prominent publishing houses in Istanbul. She is the author of nine books of poetry, and previous English translations include her book-length cycle Y'ol (Spuyten Duyvil), and the selected volume & Silk & Love & Flame (Arc Publications). Keskin is the recipient of Turkey's prestigious Golden Orange Award and the Metin Altıok Poetry Prize.
ÖYKÜ TEKTEN is a poet, translator, archivist, and editor. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo Press, an art and publishing experience with a particular focus on work in and about translation, and a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. She is the co-translator of İlhan Sami Çomak’s Separated from the Sun (Smokestack Books) and the translator of Betül Dünder’s Selected Poems (Belladonna*). She is the general editor of the Kurdish Poetry Series for Pinsapo Press, as well as a co-editor of the annual Best Literary Translations anthology from Deep Vellum.
Bilingual Edition
September 30, 2025
