Description

Nine Arches Press, paperback

Publication Date: March 28, 2024

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Khairani Barokkas uncompromising third collection of poetry amuksheds 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.

Groundbreaking in its use of form and poetics, amukdeconstructs the brutal workings of oppressive systems to examine how,through macheted etymology, violence and suffering is replicatedthrough (mis)translation. From linguistic corruption and domination, the poems make connections to the mutilation and ruin caused by an extractive colonialism that destroys whole peoples, cultures, languages, and environments.Through Khairani Barokkas own recognition of “linguistic cosmology howstars move and imprint upon the body”, radical poems of fury and prayer looktowards thesacred and ancestral, towards survival and continuance, and the vital, living resistanceof persisting languages, and resilient peoples.