Khairani Barokka Livres

Khairani Barokka's second poetry collection is an intricate exploration of colonialism and environmental injustice: her acute, interlaced language draws clear connections between colonial exploitation of fellow humans, landscapes, animals, and ecosystems. Amidst the horrifying damage that has resulted for peoples as interlinked with places, there is firm resistance. Resonant and deeply attentive, the lyricism of these poems is juxtaposed with the traumatic circumstances from which they emerge. Through these defiant, potent verses, the body--particularly the disabled body--is centred as an ecosystem in its own right. Barokka's poems are every bit as alarming, urgent and luminous as is necessary in the age of climate catastrophe as outgrowth of colonial violence.

This experimental creative non-fiction explores the intersection of art and colonial ableism, delving into the struggles faced by marginalized voices. It emphasizes the importance of reclaiming one's spirit and identity in the face of societal challenges, weaving together personal narratives and broader cultural critiques. The work invites readers to reflect on the impact of colonialism on art and the resilience required to overcome these obstacles.

A young girl is abducted and smuggled aboard a boat bound upstream on an Indonesian river, through a landscape scarred by ecological destruction and historical greed. As her captors take her ever deeper into the jungle, her uncertain fate is compounded by the sense of her environment as a place of violence, destruction and jeopardy. But it is also a place from which she herself is indigenous, and if she can root herself back into its landscape and languages, she may yet save herself. Khairani Barokka addresses issues of pollution, consumerism, and habitat destruction with a poet's sensibility, and her frenetic neon artwork, inspired by contemporary glitch artists while also incorporating traditional motifs, aims to overturn our ideas of the jungle as a place of threatening darkness

Khairani Barokka's first full poetry collection, Rope, is a spellbinding and impressive debut, kaleidoscopic in detail and richly compelling. With a meticulous artist's instinct, these finely-tuned poems ask urgent questions about our impact upon the environment, and examine carefully the fragile ties that bind our lives and our fate to our planet, our ecosystems and to our fellow humans. Sensual and ecologically attentive, Rope draws on issues of climate change, sexuality, violence, nature, desire and the body. Lush with detail, alert to its own distinct sounds, this is poetry in urgent and vivacious action - intent on finding vivid joy and hope amidst the destruction and dangers of the Anthropocene era.

amuk sheds light on the devastating and ongoing effects of a single word's mistranslation, and emphasises what exists in opposition to such hostile histories and presents: hope, resistance, and joy.