First Light

<p><span>In this bilingual collection (Turkish and English), Zafer Senocak returns to the language of his childhood even as he writes from Germany, his home since he was eleven. </span><span>Readers will find explorations of migration, exile, memory, identity, and the fine line between reason and belief — themes that have appeared throughout his career as a leading Turkish-German intellectual, but which gain new shades of meaning as he articulates them in his first language. Some poems reference mystical Islam — exploring both hidden and evident aspects of the world, the real and the dream-like — as well as Turkish poetic traditions. These poems movingly give voice to what his translator Kristin Dickinson calls “moments of cross-cultural contact and entanglement.” The book will be a fascinating companion to his earlier collection, <i>Door Languages</i>, published by Zephyr Press in 2008, translated from German by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.</span></p>