Books
Ender Başkan
Two Hundred Million Musketeers
To read Ender Başkan’s debut poetry collection, Two Hundred Million Musketeers, is to perceive across generations. Purling in streams of braided narrative – 96 pages without a stanza break – it flows with a pointed accessibility. The saying is that poetry makes nothing happen, but Two Hundred Million Musketeers makes me believe it can. A yearning lingers long after I close it: to do more, to be better.
Casual approaches to form burnish Başkan’s poetry with an anti-poetic sentiment. Many lines such as “bros before hoes / dasein before starsigns / and just a little housekeeping before we go on” underscore his ability for nonchalance. It’s simultaneously congenial, “hope-adjacent”, irreverent and discerning. In “Monolingualism Swamp” he writes: “the mask goes on or comes off im not sure” suggesting that being alive means juggling 200 million identities: poet as poet, wage-slave, father, son, friend, neighbour and both/neither Turkish/Australian (“they say you only belong to a country when you bury a loved one in it”). All these lives are so interpolated, they ring together.
An associative lucidity grounds this collection, yet each idea electrifies the next. The language is unafraid of both sentimentality and intellectualisation: “i feel like im always / getting into hot water / getting into a bath / and to take a bath / is to suffer a defeat / often financial”.
As a bookseller-poet, Başkan juxtaposes labour, capital and identity with verbal aplomb: “60 bucks for canapés! its pricey to reconnect”, he asserts. Or else, “you should write pornos then youll make money”.
Perhaps this book’s most invaluable characteristic is its neighbourly approachability. The poems disarm you with levity and quotidian-ness. “i feel like im ok at being grateful / at least nowadays” reads like a reminder to be more in this world; a world that is “95% rawdog” because it is imbued with “so much wild energy / so maximal with love”.
Despite these dichotomies and pressures, the miracle of Two Hundred Million Musketeers is its unwavering rebuke of cynicism. “Our Neighbours Poem” is my favourite poem because it becomes, through its anaphora, a portrait of far more than a handful of acquaintances: “our neighbour jump starts our car. our neighbour waves to us. our neighbour brings over clothes when i am born. our neighbours say hello” These enumerations are daily refusals to be consumed by hopelessness or defeat. They give with grace and gravitas.
Giramondo, 96pp, $27
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 31, 2026 as "Two Hundred Million Musketeers".
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