Tsunami - Deniz Basar

Deniz Başar's "Tsunami" engages in dialogue with many Turkish poets who came before him, while also venturing into territories rarely explored by Turkish poetry. The voice in "Tsunami," though born from a broad world of Turkish poetic references ranging from Ece Ayhan to Didem Madak, extends its reach from Haiti to Ghana, and further to the worlds of Indigenous and Inuit communities in North America.

“Tsunami” follows a voice that speaks directly to the reader, creating a polyphonic yet atonal music, perhaps suggesting to the reader that another way of seeing is possible. This voice also tells us a story of someone experiencing migration, confronting the experience of womanhood and its social implications again and again in different cultures, longing for Istanbul and the friends left behind there. This voice, sometimes creating a public scandal, sometimes singing a lullaby, as if drawing the reader into a real tsunami, finds other people and voices at different stops on its journey, people who are unlike it but who feel and think like it.

Editor: Mina Cakmak
Cover design: İrem Yıldırım