MAWAR ABU-ABU / ASH GRAY ROSES
Author: Dorothea Rosa Herliany
Publication Date: September 2024
ISBN: 9 786239 517830
Bilingual edition in Indonesian and English.
This book was first published in a limited run for the Berlin Asia Art Festival 2023.
Revised and reprinted in September 2024.
The poetry collection Mawar Abu-Abu / Ash-Gray Roses presents a selection of Dorothea Rosa Herliany’s finest works. This bilingual collection, in Indonesian and English, showcases the diversity of subjects and styles chosen by the poet to portray the lives of women—often symbolized as roses in a male-centered world—who continue to fight for equality, justice, and freedom. To remain roses as defined by men would render women unrecorded beings, leaving behind villages buried beneath forests of roses: a dense universe draped in ash.
“Dorothea’s poems reach readers from a narrow, dim imaginary space, surrounded by a vast darkness. That small circle is a world of complex social relationships, where the lyrical ‘I’ often struggles simply to survive. In this world are women and children, saints and sinners, husbands and lovers. Beyond it lies a turbulent outer world filled with others—some unknown yet possibly full of kindness, others posing significant danger. The ‘fragrance of the rice fields’ lingers across cliffs and the echoing surf, the glow of rainbows and the mysteries of midnight—all inviting readers to look within themselves, yet also beyond themselves.”
