"While serving a thirteen-year sentence as a political prisoner during the Second World War, Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), Turkey's foremost modern poet, embarked on the writing of his great epic, Human Landscapes from My Country. Now published in full for the first time in English on the occasion of the poet's centennial, this stunning 17,000-line verse-novel at once documents Turkey's historic change from an Islamic empire to a secular republic and exemplifies his vision of life as a communal experiment in creating the world in the image of our dreams."--BOOK JACKET.