Architecture of Curtains

The poems in The Architecture of Curtains reject the finality of resolutions. This chapbook interrogates the fragile boundary existing between the inner and external components in the complex existence of life. It tries to understand the point where the world is translated into a language of the universe and the moment when the persona’s immediate environment becomes a refuge and an inaudible threat to his memory. In The Architecture of Curtains, Ismael Bala tries to ask the abstract question: what does it mean to reside in a body that remembers?The Architecture of Curtains is a series of rooms in the space of absence that shapes presence.

Odu Ode

The Architecture of Curtains is a contemplative collection that moves between the intimate weather of the body and the larger landscapes of memory, faith, love, loss, and mortality. In these poems, ordinary objects like curtains, shoes, leaves, and windows become thresholds into questions of truth and transcendence. But Bala’s poems do not offer easy answers, they invite us instead to stand at the threshold, where the visible world parts like a curtain and something deeper begins to emerge.

Ayeyemi Taofeek

The Architecture of Curtains is a delicate, razor-sharp excavation of what it means to inhabit a space that both shelters and threatens. Moving through four distinct movements—Public Weather, What the Body Keeps, Unsafe Rooms, and Afterlight—Ismail Bala charts the subtle, fracturing line between the internal self and the physical world. Here, domestic spaces become sites of quiet reckoning; a curtain is not merely a barrier, but a body practicing how to remain in the face of fear, memory, and sudden light.

Henry Opeyemi

Cover Art by Fadilah Ismail
Cover Design by Drum Lørd