Khairani Barokka’s uncompromising third collection of poetry 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. Groundbreaking in its use of form and poetics, amuk deconstructs the brutal workings of oppressive systems to examine how, “through macheted etymology”, violence and suffering is replicated through (mis)translation. These radical poems of fury and prayer look towards the vital, living resistance of persisting languages, and resilient peoples.
Here we encounter the women in famous paintings by Marais, Chardin, and Hockney, luminous, reimagined, and speaking for themselves. Artefacts are also animated into life in Dermott-Bond’s darkly magical poems - a taxidermied mouse, a 17th century axe, even Helen Sharman’s spacesuit where ‘earth-slight and beautiful’ we are ‘turning bright cartwheels in our orbit’. Personal, social and domestic histories are captured and repainted with a precise hand and a gimlet eye for detail.

Frieze allows the reader to hear silent, unrequited conversations – framed and unframed – that explore the ferocious and delicate nature of memory, history, the body.