Poetry reading: Gonca Özmen & Aigerim Tazhi

Gonca Özmen (1982, Türkiye) is one of the best-known and most remarkable female Turkish poets of her generation. Her poems are playful, rhythmic and original, with language that both reflects and breaches tradition, sometimes in the same sentence. Love is never far away, though she seldom elucidates it in an unambiguous or lyrical way. She allows expectations and desires to clash with all the mistakes, fantasies and untruths that are often associated with love, generally adopting a critical feminist perspective. What Özmen shows above all is how complex and unfathomable the relationships between people can be; all the expectations and assumptions, leading almost inevitably to misunderstandings. Her work also reflects ingrained patterns and attitudes, particularly those of the male gaze on women. Physicality, vulnerability and the values surrounding the female body, play a major role in Özmen’s work: “My body is a gun made of sorrow / aimed at you".

Aigerim Tazhi (1981) is a Kazakh poet whose poetry impresses and will move you. The profusion of images Tazhi conjures up makes her poetry a compelling call to reconsider the principles behind her world of magic. In her collection Paper-thin Skin she sketches a miraculous world that nonetheless seems to be completely watertight. However fictional characters, creatures and landscapes may be, they are photographically lifelike from head to toe, each with its own self-evident logic. Scenes of everyday domestic life metamorphose into almost unimaginable surrealism. Her poetry is thus one of twists and turns; her poems are portals to places that could be anywhere around us. Everywhere, and yet, always just out of reach. Tazhi's poetry is one of a reversal of roles, a depersonalized narrative where the author's perspective is often missing and has been exchanged for that of perception. 'Work of stunning originality' (John Butler).

Host: Jasper Henderson