‘Everyone who is interested in art/poetry/politics should be reading and looking at Khairani Barokka’s work.’ — Sophie Collins
‘Indigenous Species is an oceanic howl in your face. A complex soup of darkness, lushness, pollution, landfills outside Jakarta, palm oil deforestation, resilience and outsiderness… Angry, delicate and deeply touching at once.’ — Bruno Verner
‘A ballad about wounded islands and their people, Indigenous Species reminds me of an old song, the kind our village storytellers used to sing. It has a fairytale quality, setting a dreamlike world alongside the horror of real lives; in other words, it’s like a lullaby, but one that will make you stay awake.’ — Eka Kurniawan
The cover of Rope, Nine Arches Press. Cover photograph by Khairani Barokka.
'With Rope, Khairani Barokka braids a helix from the “metronomic hum of human breath” and history’s apparitions, daring to “strangle Myth whole.” These are poems to reach for in times of emergency, a nerve-bright lifeline for exploring how “Survival is an eternal thing”. Polyphonic, and polychromatic, Barokka’s work pulls us up from the brink “all-cells awake” to belt out to the void: “Thank you abysses, rock-bottoms, … morasses of salt – I am singing.” What a blessing to have this lyrical, defiant book, this provocation and hymn.’
– R.A. Villanueva
‘Rope is the debut of a unique lyric voice – inventive and varied, rich in imagery, and always rooted in a searching intelligence. These beautifully written poems fizz with all the ‘shimmer and jazz’ of modern life.’
– Jane Yeh
‘In a fertile genesis of tundra and twilight, with the life-giving tenderness of olive oil, spinach, and sambal, Khairani Barokka’s radiant full-length debut, Rope, weaves the guiding lights of womanhood with a weathering of desire “quietly washing our skin / into the drains of Kathmandu.” Here is a lush world of regeneration where aubergines are “nourished from disintegrated bone,” where a sea-turtle is a “Salt-tongued priestess,” and where flood season changes “each ounce of rainfall” into a woman. Mingling syllables of Baso Minang, Javanese, and Indonesian with an Anglophone tongue, Barokka’s voice transforms her polyglot, transnational experiences – of rogue loves spanning a quartet of continents, of cathedrals and archipelagos unmoored from empires – into a global compass rose, celebrating journeys of ruin and restoration with renewed praise: “Ada sungai di pesisir. / Sini kalian. / Ikat tali diri ke samudra. // There’s a river on the shore. / Come closer. / Tie the rope of yourself to the sea.”’