Trading Roots: Fiona Bolger & Özgecan Kesici
Sunday 4th June 2023 at 2:00pm
Join us for a conversation through poetry —an intimate afternoon of words with poets Özgecan Kesici and Fióna Bolger. A decade ago, these two poets met at a reading on a rainy Dublin evening. They found in each other a mutual fascination with languages in all their ability to produce and complicate meaning, and their work troubles the borders of languages, place, motherhood and alienation. Now living in different countries, they continue the conversation that began all those years ago by meeting online, immersing themselves in words, and creating a lifeline built of poems between Dublin and Berlin.
They will share this work and chat about how the poems speak to each other and the work that inspires them. They will dip between languages: Tamil and Turkish, Irish and Kazakh, Arabic and German, and the conversation will offer an alternative discourse to current discussions around borders. Making this work between languages and across borders is both a statement of political intent and a personal journey.
The event will be introduced by poet Anne Tannam and there will be ambient live music looping by Aidan Murphy.
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Fióna Bolger is a creative mentor, facilitator and poet. Her particular interest is play between languages. Salmon Poetry released Love in the Original Language in 2022 and her earlier collection A Compound of Words, was published by Yoda Press, Delhi in 2019. She has published a grimoire, The Geometry of Love Between the Elements (PB Press, 2013) and edited an anthology of poetry between Irish and Indian poets, All the Worlds Between (Yoda Press, 2017). She is the recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award.
Özgecan Kesici is a researcher, translator and writer. Özgecan was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Literature Bursary to complete work on her debut poetry collection, which is set to be released in 2024. She is currently completing edits on her debut novel: Silver is Lighter, an historical female epic for which she was awarded a 2022 Berlin Senate Literature Work Stipend. Her translation of Rakhymzhan Otarbayev’s Kazakh short stories is forthcoming with Dağyeli Verlag, 2023.
