Ultimatum Orangutan

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.

“Khairani Barokka's Ultimatum Orangutan is a book like no other. But what does that mean? It means that Barokka finds a new music via which she is able to tell us things we thought we knew, but didn't quite know. How to tell the time by sky. How to see our planet's history of climate change through a lyric poet's eye and be astonished. She tells us that strangeness is perhaps our last chance. She finds a language to speak about everything and anything. Even to speak about eight hundred-odd US military bases ("they stud me like a punk"). I am writing from a drowning ship, she says. Meaning our planet, friends. She teaches rage, that sun-cloaked wrath. Violence taught us elegance, she says. That ghost orchid is wisdom, she says. This is planetary poetics. Listen. Listen to the voice of this poet. It might not be too late for us, after all. Ultimatum Orangutan is an inimitable, necessary book.” - Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa