Jennifer Reimer
Keşke
Wistful memory, future longing, nostalgia for unrealized possibilities, Keşke joins the ancient and the modern to the intense lyric experience of self-discovery. Watery scenes rewrite Homeric myth with a feminist eye while verses unfold inner worlds with tangible sensuality. Experimental yet measured, Keşke is shaped by forgotten caves, ancient ruins, wave-battered ships, and the ragged angularity of the Mediterranean coast. Evoking desire for what is absent, Keşke traverses the slipping movement of time and attachment, hope and impossibility, with a clear eye and a passionate hunger for where and what we might have been.
Cover design: Nathan Putens
ISBN: 978-1-950404-08-7
Paperback: $18
Publication date: October 1, 2022
Jennifer A. Reimer Recio is Assistant Professor of American Studies and MFA Program Coordinator at Oregon State University—Cascades. She has lived in Cyprus, Turkey, Denmark, Austria, and the Basque coast. A proud native Californian, she currently lives in Bend, Oregon with her husband and The Cat Belmonte. Follow her on Instagram @jenniferareimer.
Praise for Keşke
“Haunting, spare and beautiful, Jennifer Reimer’s poems invite us to examine the inmost wishes of our hearts.”
—Madeline Miller, author of Circe and The Song of Achilles
“Jennifer Reimer’s gorgeous Keşke reworlds the neglected desire and historical will of Calypso. Collapsing time through citation, she remolds myth’s methods as they become embodied as seaworn landscapes. As her epic’s aperture opens on the political violence of contemporary Turkey, even as the stony ruins of the physical and the mythical accumulate, Reimer’s verse maps the oft unanswerable, historical cry of ‘What if?’”
—J. Michael Martinez, author of Museum of the Americas
“Jennifer Reimer’s Keşke is both radically intimate and political, haunted and activated by a shimmering landscape of shifting lines and columns, entangled prose and verse that feels both speculative and mythological. Keşke is the beckoning song of a siren reborn from a shipwrecked sailor, and in our longing to answer that call is our wish that this shipwrecked world will find its way to the same.”
—Mia You, author of I, Too, Dislike It
Excerpt from Keşke
The Day After the Failed Military Coup
The day after the Failed Military Coup is hot. Everyone stayed up until 6 a.m. Bleary-eyed from live streaming Al Jazeera or BBC, we blinked into the bright July. Some hours later, your body remembers: the sound and feel of the Parliament explosion like the first plane first tower—another hot day. Two days after the Failed Military Coup, you cry over 9/11 (at last). The smoke and ash. The last train from lower Manhattan filled with ghosts. The bodies falling through memory, always falling. Far away in Anatolia, where summer smells like scorched sweet grass and pine, you remember the smell of steel and death, how you walked past it twice a day for months. On the day after the Failed Military Coup, you’re still thinking of keşke and feel guilty about this. You remember Andrew’s first apartment in the West Village in 2001 and you wish—(keşke-keşke-keşke). You talk about poetry and—why you don’t want to talk about it. On the day after the Failed Military Coup, you drink because—. Turkey breaks—and you don’t want anyone to know. Two days after the Failed Military Coup, you’ve decided, but you don’t know it yet— —and— you might as well finally—