Bring Something Back

Bring Something Back is about the oldest instinct a visitor has: you had a good time somewhere and you want to hand a piece of it to someone at home. The collection opens with the nazar, the blue glass eye every traveler carries out of Türkiye in a coat pocket, and works outward from there: a crate of Kumluca tomatoes, olive branches from the Taurus, the fluted minaret that has stood since 1230, a kilim-patterned loggerhead, a breakfast that takes all morning, a list of the nine words you actually learned. Some of it is the shirt you keep for yourself. Most of it is the shirt you buy in the last hour before the airport, for the person who kept an eye on the apartment while you were gone. Twenty-five ways of saying I was there and I thought about you.