A Promenade at Home

Sevinç Çalhanoğlu is a poet, artist, and researcher whose work examines the imprint of memory on space, and the intersection of both with literature. In addition to poems and essays, she creates interdisciplinary literary works incorporating sound and photography. She is the author of two books of poetry in Turkish: the original edition of A Promenade at Home, Evde bir gezinti (periferik) (Nod, 2016), and Et/ve/Fal (Heterotopya, 2017); and is an initiator of the Turkish poetry journal Moero. My Life in Curves Recently, a zine of hand-drawn graphs plotting her daily rhythms and habits during coronavirus lockdown, was published by Bored Wolves in 2020. She is based in Brooklyn.

Equal parts lyric and performative, A Promenade at Home is a meticulous cataloging of possession in all its forms. Revisiting her childhood home in Istanbul in spirit, poet Sevinç Çalhanoğlu overhears a conversation between her mother and the sentient house, their dialogue a cantillated litany of decorations past and present. Meanwhile, her mother bustles about with broom and bleach, seeking to disrupt the settling of dust and malefic hexes in rooms that arrange themselves into a theatrical set.