Moments of Being and Becoming

About the Book

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.” -Virginia Woolf Maybe I just am- Or waiting to become. This collection of prose-like poetry portrays the moments of being and becoming that have materialized from the clear-eyed perspective of a child. It urges the reader to take the time to look around and notice how everything old is enveloped in a sense of newness. It paints a picture of a timeless state and stateless time, where nothing manages to escape the undoing of the past and yet everything becomes tinted with the undertones of change unfolding before the poet’s gaze. Places traveled. A home lost and several homes found. The foreign and the familiar. Sights. Smells. Sunsets. The names and the faces behind them. These poems embody the search for peace in the heart of chaos, a sense of calm in the wake of turbulence, and a center from the margins at best. These moments shared find the poet and reader at a crossroads where the soul is satisfied and kept vital only when it is given the chance to explore both the old in the new and the new in the old. May these moments fuel your search as you seek to find your own, set out to be and become. Keep looking and keep searching, for it is your findings that flow into the vast oceans of our collective being-a timeless state that transcends the daily life.

About the Author

Leyla Savsar holds an MEd degree from Boston University and a BA degree in English language and literature from Kuwait University. She is currently a PhD student of English literature and rhetoric at the State University of New York (SUNY), Binghamton. When she isn’t writing papers for classes, she reads poems for the Harpur Palate, an acclaimed literary journal published biannually by the Department of English at Binghamton University, and writes her own poems. Devoted to the language arts and working with children and adults alike, she has volunteered as an ESL teacher at Sylvan Learning and the Somali Development Center. Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, she currently resides in Binghamton, New York.