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Poet, writer, translator and medical doctor Hilal Karahan’s poems in Forty Patchworks Forty Wounds, convey the voices of women who have no words about their own body, clothes, education, marriage and future; who are exposed to physical and psychological violence; who are raped, and reflect their drama.
Witnessing/partnering the suffering of women from different geographies and cultures, Karahan’s narrative poems in Forty Patchworks Forty Wounds are also documentary, with visuals and news excerpts.
In the poems in which women’s place in society, sexuality, marriage and motherhood are questioned, it is striking that Hilâl Karahan is in favor of feminist sensibility and sisterhood.
It is Hilâl Karahan’s lyrical attitude that feed documentary featured poems in Forty Patchworks Forty Wounds. The transfer of emotion in the poems is riveted with photographs and provides the thematic integrity of the book. It can be said that Karahan’s poetry subjects paint a hopeless and dark picture of life.
In Forty Patchworks Forty Wounds, in the “widow’s lament” section, “death in the aegean sea”, “refugee tent”, “boco haram”, “little, black ...”, “white comb”, “widow”, “widow’s lament”, “curettage”; the poems titled “girls’ feast”, “vaginismus treatment”, “tubal ligation”, “hazelnut workers”, “nuptials in a hazelnut tent”, “incest” in the section of “alaplı poems” prove that women do not have a room of their own/freedom.