October

Nur Turkmani

What do we carry from one year to the next? What remains after devastation, and what, despite everything, takes root again?

Winner of the Purple Ink Press Poetry Contest.


2 April 2026
Paperback / 9781914221408
ebook / 9781914221415
124 pages

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‘This beautiful debut collection is structured by the big picture events of a life in Beirut over six Octobers … But despite the largeness of its frame, this collection deals primarily in tender intimacies. Through friendship, love, care, and everyday landscapes … Turkmani draws a portrait of a city and life within it that is rich and haunted by violences.’
— Mizna

October in Lebanon is heavy with memory. The euphoria of the 2019 revolution feels far away, its anniversaries marked by crisis, war and the genocide in Gaza.

Across multiple Octobers, Nur Turkmani meditates on rupture, transformation and the quiet undoing and remaking of relationships during collective catastrophe. Part archive, part love letter, her debut poetry collection holds the ordinary and the extraordinary in the same breath, spanning balconies and border towns, fig trees and songs for friends, autumn light and the instinct to flee.

Formally spare and emotionally saturated, October refuses both numbness and spectacle. These poems ask what it means to survive the world and still long for it; and how we hold what’s disappearing, or changing too quickly to make sense of.