however the almond appearsisn’t how i see itblooming into madness for a minutebehind a thin veila fuzzy green almondmake me bittercount me among the almonds, said Celani can’t look at the almond any other way, believe methe beauty of the worldat daybreak for a minutewhen the shell went on too longand all of it turned into a lieafter this layer, to this songadd me add me, me toowhatever the almond is to you, it is not to me BademBademin sana göründüğü nasılsaBadem o değil bana.Çılgınlığa açması, kısacık.İncecik tülün ardındanTüylü yeşil bir çağla.Beni de acı yap, acı yap benibademleyen say beni dedi ya, CelanBademe başka türlü bakamam inan.Hani o ilk sabah olurkenkigüzelliği dünyanın kısacık,ve kabuğun uzun sürdüğüve sonra hepsinin yalan olduğubu kattan sonra, bu acı türküyekat kat beni de kat, beni de.Badem sana neyse, o değil bende.
Almond
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“Almond” from EARTHLY CONDITIONS: by Birhan Keskin.
Published by World Poetry Books October 14th, 2025.
English Copyright © 2025 by Öykü Tekten.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Birhan Keskin was born in Kırklareli, a town on the European side of Turkey in 1963. A graduate of the literature department of Istanbul University, she published her first poem in 1984. Between 1995 and 1998, she published the literary journal Göçebe (Nomad), and has worked as the editor of numerous publications. Her poetry books include Y’ol (Y’ol), Soğuk Kazı (The Cold Excavation), and Fakir Kene (The Poor Tick), all from Metis Publishers. Keskin’s book Ba won the Altın Portakal (Golden Orange) poetry prize in Turkey in 2006. Her Soğuk Kazi won the Metin Altıok poetry prize in 2016.
Öykü Tektenis a poet, translator, editor, and archivist living between Granada and New York. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo, NY-based collective and press with a particular focus on work in and about translation, as well as a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, Words Without Borders, and World Literature Today among other places. She is the translator of Selected Poems by Betül Dünder (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023) and the co-translator of Separated from the Sun by İlhan Sami Çomak (Smokestack Books, 2022). Currently she works as a co-editor for the Best Literary Translations Anthology (Deep Vellum, 2024) and the general editor of Kurdish Poetry Chapbook Series (Pinsapo Press)
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.”
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