ISBN: 9781911027232

Published: October 2017

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.

‘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,…morass of salt — I am singing." What a blessing to have this lyrical, defiant book, this provocation and hymn.’ - R.A. Villanueva, author of Reliquaria