On poetry, migration, belonging, and the joy of seeing dreams take form

My Fragile poetry book has now been published, and for a while, I could not write for my blog. Not because there was nothing to say, but because I was living inside the very things I would one day want to write about.

The past weeks have been full. I have been preparing for the launch event of Welcome Home Artists Platform, working on the piece I will present there, and at the same time, moving through the final steps of seeing my first poetry book, FRAGILE, come into the world.

This Fragile poetry book brings together poems and drawings shaped by migration, memory, vulnerability, love, and the quiet search for belonging. In many ways, it speaks to the same emotional landscape as Welcome Home: the desire to rebuild a sense of home through creativity, connection, and shared experience.

It has been a season of lists, emails, meetings, design decisions, installation details, publishing preparations, and many quiet emotional moments in between.

Somehow, all these different parts of my life have started to speak to one another. You can see all the traces here on the artworks of my last solo exhibition!

A poetry book that arrived quietly

My poetry book FRAGILE is now officially published by Banliyo Kitap.

Even writing this sentence still feels slightly unreal.

These poems did not begin as a book. They came into my life quietly over the years. Some were written in Australia. Some appeared while I was trying to understand what “home” meant after moving from one continent to another. Some came between airports, loneliness, love, fear, excitement, and hope.

At the time, I did not think they were preparing themselves for a future. They were simply feelings looking for a place to exist.

Some of them even arrived with drawings beside them, as if words alone were not enough. A line would come, then a small drawing. A feeling would appear, then a mark. Sometimes the image understood the poem before I did.

Now, somehow, they are together in one book.

FRAGILE brings together short poems and simple drawings that trace the emotional landscapes of home, love, solitude, longing, vulnerability, and rebirth. It is a book shaped by migration, but also by the quieter journey of becoming closer to oneself.

My dear friend Benan Bilek, who wrote so beautifully about the book, described Fragile as a quiet but powerful inner journey. Her words touched me deeply because she saw something I had carried almost silently: that fragility is not only about being hurt. It is also about changing, softening, becoming lighter, coming closer to oneself, and learning how to fly again.

That understanding sits at the heart of this book.

Where poetry began for me

When I think about poetry, I do not only think about books.

I think about my high school years in Ankara, standing inside Dost Bookstore in Kızılay, sometimes reading an entire poetry book without moving. I remember standing there, almost frozen, unable to put the book down, drinking in the lines as if they could quench a thirst I had carried for years.

But the first seeds of my love for poetry were planted even earlier.

They were planted while reading poems to my beloved Aunt Zennure, who lived diagonally across from our home and became bedridden after a stroke. There were not many poetry books at home, so we read the same poems again and again. Slowly, almost without noticing, we began to memorize them. Sometimes I would start a line, and she would finish it.

That memory has stayed with me all my life.

When we recently went out to celebrate the publication of my first poetry book, my aunt was there with me, too, in my heart.

So this book is not only a new beginning. It is also a return. A return to the child who read poems aloud. A return to the young girl who stood in bookstores for hours. A return to all the quiet rooms where words became shelter.

You can find FRAGILE through the publisher here!

Welcome Home and rebuilding belonging

At the same time, I have been working intensely on the launch of the Welcome Home Artists Platform.

Welcome Home grew from a desire to create together and to imagine home not only as a physical place, but as something we can build through memory, creativity, connection, and shared experience.

As someone who has moved from Türkiye to Australia, and then to the United States, I often return to questions of memory, migration, identity, and belonging. These questions appear in my paintings, installations, writings, and drawings. They are also present in the work I am preparing for the Welcome Home launch event.

In many ways, Welcome Home and FRAGILE speak to each other.

One is a poetry book.
One is an artist’s platform.
But both are born from the same inner landscape: migration, vulnerability, memory, and the deep human desire to belong.

I have written more about the ideas behind Welcome Home in my recent articles on Substack and LinkedIn.

You can read them here: Welcome Home article on Substack

Welcome Home article on LinkedIn

Some dreams are already here

What moves me most in this moment is not only that these projects are happening.

It is that they once existed only as quiet dreams.

There was a time when I could only imagine having my poems in a book. There was a time when Welcome Home was only an idea, a conversation, a feeling that something like this was needed.

Now, step by step, they are becoming visible.

This does not mean the process is easy. Every dream that becomes real asks for work, patience, discipline, courage, and many moments of doubt. But there is a particular kind of happiness that comes when you realize you are not only dreaming anymore. You are building.

Seeing one dream take form gives strength for the next one.

We have already begun talking about and planning future projects and events for this year through the Welcome Home Artists Platform. There are ideas taking shape, conversations opening, and new possibilities slowly becoming clearer. I cannot share everything yet, but I am looking forward to sharing more soon.

Right now, I feel grateful to be making these invisible things visible, one poem, one drawing, one artwork, one gathering, and one shared space at a time.

FRAGILE is out in the world now.
Welcome Home Artists Platform is preparing to meet its first audience.

And I am standing here with the quiet happiness of someone who can finally say:

Some dreams are no longer waiting in the distance.
Some dreams are already here.