Nomadologies Poems

Nomadologies is a complex and brilliant evocation of the fractured and hyphenated mindset of the contemporary Turkish writer and thinker. Erdag Göknar takes us on a dazzling virtual world tour encompassing history, aesthetics, and politics, from Bosnia to Chechnya to the Silk Road to Union Square and back to the place that was once the center of the civilized world, Istanbul/Constantinople. Turkophiles like myself have been waiting for years for Göknar to publish his findings from the multilayered world he inhabits, and here it is. This is a book I shall be returning to often.

–Richard Tillinghast, author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul and cotranslator of Dirty August by Edip Cansever

The poems in Nomadologies connect moments of separation and union in a life lived between Turkey and America. Taking its organizing principle from the grammar of nomadic life, Nomadologies reveals that mobility is the most efficient strategy for sustaining contradictory existences. Here, we learn that poetry is a landscape of inhabitation, and perpetual exile is one’s home.

Erdag Göknar is a scholar, writer, and translator. He is best known for his award-winning translation of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red. He is a faculty member at Duke University where he researches, teaches, and writes on Turkish Studies.