By the final section, “Home,” the journey has come full circle. The explorer must now settle down and take in the knowledge she has gained upon the path. It is time to “stop at this edge” for a time, and linger there until the next voyage beckons—which could happen at any time, because “the explorer becomes the path, in the end.”

The politics of the work lies in the very lessons the explorer learns from the creatures she meets. In a sense, the bull can be likened to a kind ruler, toppled by cruel minions: he is tortured and killed by villains who carry “ knives that veil cowardice with ornaments.” The butterfly represents the revolutionary, who has come to earth before his time, and gets mercilessly attacked by “grizzly insect guards.” Like the bull, the butterfly’s dark fate has been sealed: “having failed to change the laws of the earth,” his carcass becomes “a more valuable fertilizer than the earth deserves.”

Many such instances of power struggles—bet ween wisdom and ignorance, kindness and cruelty, joy and pain—appear throughout the collection. But, more than politics, the role of spirituality is central to these poems. With Book of the Edge, Temelkuran clearly defines herself as a descendant of the Sufi tradition. The Sufis believe in the importance of discovering one’s true self, only to then let go of that self and become united with God. According to Sufis, there is no such thing as a separate identity: the concept of “I” and “you” is mere illusion. The structure of Temelkuran’s poems reflects this philosophy: from poem to poem, the voice alternates between first and second person. It is not always clear if the explorer is the speaker or the reader, but this fluid identity is exactly what Temelkuran is after.

The content of the poems, too, speaks to the Sufi tradition, which remains influential in Turkey. From the start, the explorer is urged to let go of her ego. In preparation for the journey, she is told to “empty your saddlebag—your Me—/ as much as possible.” As the poems progress, it becomes clear that the goal of the journey is to complete this banishing of the “Me.” Lines occasionally appear that allow the reader to track the explorer’s progress on this path, lines like, “You now consist only of yourself,” “It was tender, honestly: my mind was turning into water,” and “you aren’t water yet.” But in the end, though we may believe in a separate self, the “Me” is mere appearance. The book ends with the assertion that “though we may be / Water, earth, air, and we may each be a universe, / We appear as somebody among the crowds.”