Çağlar Köseoğlu
BOOKS
POEMS
VISUALS
AUDIO
EVENTS
CONTACT
Nasleep
Nasleep [Aftermath] (2020) takes the Gezi Park protests of 2013 as a starting point and explores the remnants of that historical moment in which ‘another world’ seemed within reach. The title refers to the peculiar temporality after the global uprisings in Istanbul, Cairo, and Oakland–when the political horizon appeared to have closed again, yet new worlds had been set in motion. Pushing the genre of the political poem to its limits, the collection explores the political value of poetry at its zero-point and resists the risk of political poetry’s fetishization in the aftermath. Nasleep oscillates between polyphonic, critical noise, and post-revolutionary affects.
PRAISE
“Köseoğlu is consistent in applying his poetics, which allows him to write a very distinctive kind of poetry — more distinctive and more unruly than what we have seen so far in Dutch poetry. But the moments when the poet temporarily lowers his poetical armor and tells the reader more directly about feelings of depression and political melancholy are at least as powerful as the astonishingly meticulous way in which the poems are constructed.”
– Bram Ieven
“Köseoğlu wants ‘poetry that goes beyond reproducing our impasse’ and throws me into the deep end with his multilingual, multifarious work. He has his doubts about the feasibility of poetry, the feasibility of a community. Yet he writes — and how.”
– Alfred Schaffer
“Nasleep received an 'honorable mention' instead of a nomination from the Buddingh’ jury: well-intentioned, no doubt, but frankly, that wasn’t quite the aftertaste I was left with. It was bizarre, too, because this self-assured, brave book would have fit effortlessly alongside the other four.”
– Laurens Ham
34
34 (2015) seeks to destabilize the nationalist, mythological self-image of Turkey by reading it against the lived realities of Kurds subjected to lethal state violence. Through rhythmic, multivocal, lyrical, and search-engine-based forms, 34 develops poetic strategies against ethno-militaristic Turkish discourses. The name ‘Mustafa’, recurring on every page as a formal principle, gradually decentres and loses its foundational, historical-nationalist charge. 34 is both an anti-history of Turkey and an abstract elegy for a group of Kurdish border traders killed in a Turkish airstrike.
PRAISE
“Köseoğlu is a poet like there is no other in the Netherlands.”
– Maarten van der Graaff