GUERNICA EDITIONS | 49TH SHELF | AMAZON | BARNES&NOBLE

 
Backbone by Meryem Yildiz stretches from the shores of the St. Lawrence River in Montreal to the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, charting a course through the fractured landscapes of identity and selfhood. Through breathy narratives and compact, distilled moments, Yildiz confronts the weight of trauma and the shifting sands of cultural identity, revealing how these forces shape, and reshape, the body and spirit. As she navigates chronic pain, displacement, and the memories that linger, the speaker asks, “Who am I if I don’t recognize myself?” At the heart of this debut is the deeply intimate bond between the speaker and Clara, a steadfast friend whose presence transcends boundaries and anchors the quest for belonging. Backbone is a testament to the transformative power of human connection and the capacity for renewal amidst the struggles of identity and experience.

PRAISE FOR BACKBONE

“Now, the year opens like a sign, ready for iterations,” writes Meryem Yildiz, her words a compass, language like symmetry that rolls off one’s own feeling and emotion, profound and rightly clarifying. The book is layered, sultry and queerly erotic; it’s tactile in its longing. She writes, “how it absorbed the tangy sweat of your arched, flushed forehead like a sea sponge.” The words drip with ease, with potency, and we are brought into her Cancerian world of shelter and ballads about love. Backbone is now a favourite, I will return to this book again and again. I’m a Yildiz fan now.
— Fariha Róisín, author of How to Cure a Ghost, Who Is Wellness For? and Survival Takes a Wild Imagination

The poems in Meryem Yildiz’s dazzling debut, Backbone, traverse the intersections of queer friendship, chronic pain, dreaming and waking life. They move between exterior and interior landscapes, from the “deep green veins” of the day as it “finds its way to midnight.” There is a sense of telescoping backwards over a life in order to find meaning both in the paths taken and not taken. Pushing against the limits of this double life, Yildiz’s speaker asks: “Who am I if I don’t recognize myself?” This collection seeks to answer this question by recognizing the various forms of home and elsewhere that make up immigrant and female experience. “I left a world too,” Yildiz’s speaker addresses the reader: “we can learn together.”
— Kasia Van Schaik, author of We Have Never Lived on Earth

I want to offer line after line out of Backbone to tell you how beautiful it is. Meryem Yildiz writes, “the paper bends, you lean out of / yourself,” and we bend too, like grass, “in every blade / the ability to live.” Her poetry is filled with lush rhythms, glistening with both pain and hope, “the white noise of your body crackling heedless.” I am in awe of these poems, their wondrous language, and how they evoke all the complicated sensations of being alive, looking for kinship, brimming with possibility.
— T. Liem, author of Obits. and Slows: Twice

Richly interiorized, Meryem Yildiz’s debut collection is a brave, intimate, absorbing meditation on human connection, chronic pain, and the complexities of identity. Backbone gifts us the full range – from narrative, breathy poems to shorter, more compact ones – in a language lush and fertile. Each poem is like another onion layer peeled back on vulnerability; taken together, they take us on an emotional journey toward a powerful message of healing and hope, of “elsewhere beckoning.” My advice to you: read it slowly; savour these poems of the heart and mind—complex, sensual, and deftly executed.
— Carolyn Marie Souaid, author of This Side of Light: Selected Poems (1995-2020)