Protection by Robert Bal Catherine Okoronkwo mostly) in a wonky poetics

mostly) in a wonky poetics of anxiety and joy at the world we are thoroughly and catastrophically screwing up

a poem of 84 couplets

hears our own

From Robben Island to Hiroshima

Yet it has long remained a hidden territory - and even now

Protection by Robert Bal Catherine Okoronkwo mostly) in a wonky poeticsIn this collection, Robert Bal interrogates on going and belated conditions he names the imperial benign. Protection is both a work of aftermath and an intense succession of colonial instants, scenes or sensations experienced in the United Kingdom, though processed (felt) elsewhere. With deep care, Bal marks the transposition between external forms of oppression and their internalization, tracking the fact of otherness, the poesis of cultural