About the Book
WINNER of the 2025 Lammy Awards for Bisexual Poetry
"Interrogation Records is not only an important piece of historical research but also a display of significant poetic talent." --Electric Literature, "15 New and Forthcoming Collections You Should Be Reading"
The winner of the 2023 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, selected by Divya Victor.
Breaking the silence and collective amnesia around the Indonesian mass killings of 1965.
To this day, there exists a black hole of silence in Indonesia's socio-political climate in acknowledging the 1965 Indonesian mass killings as what they were-tragedy. Jeddie Sophronius' Interrogation Records is a rare docupoetry collection that explores and calls into question the 'official' narratives revolving around the 1965 massacre.
Also known as "The Communist Purge," the massacre resulted in the slaughter of members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and anyone accused of affiliations to it-many of whom were civilians-by the Indonesian army. Throughout the collection, the voice of Sophronius' speaker/researcher is quiet but always present, contending with the aftermath of state violence and silencing, in a masterful blend of personal and collective history, memory, and remembering. Sophronius presents both authoritative and artistic language in the same plane, urging us to consider how documents, archives, and testimony may hold affective power and excavate a different truth.
Within a climate of silence and erasure, Interrogation Records is a remedy of collective amnesia.
About the Author :
Jeddie Sophronius is the author of the poetry collections Happy Poems & Other Lies (Codhill Press, 2024), Love & Sambal (The Word Works, 2024), and the chapbook Blood-Letting (Quarterly West, 2023), a runner-up for Quarterly West's 2022 Chapbook Contest. A Chinese-Indonesian writer, educator, and translator originally from Jakarta, he received his B.A. in English: Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia, where he served as the editor of Meridian. Their poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere, while their prose is forthcoming in The Third Coast and The Arkansas International. They currently live and teach in Charlottesville, VA. They divide their time between Indonesia and the United States. Read more of their work at nakedcentaur.com
Review :
"A keen, sparse, documentary approach to archival records. Yet it is not bloodless or without passion. The most significant documentary poetry tethers us to the historic event with the poetic line as if it were our very sinews....It enlivens the dead texts of archives, reanimates them so that we recall and revere the human lives that they document. It intentionally shapes verse and prose so that that our own relationship with the historical event...is built slowly through the greater facilities that reading can engender: curiosity, critical judgment, generous discernment born of difficulty, and a luminous attention to bureaucratic language which structures yet obscures so much of our social existence...I receive [Jeddie's] book as a gift and a redress of silence. And every time we learn history through poetry that intentionally unsilences the archives, we are unwriting a master-narrative, we are writing and reading as a prevention of erasure, we are writing and reading as a cure for amnesia." -Divya Victor
"A vital exploration of a little-known historical event: the Indonesian killings of 1965-1966. Painstakingly archival and highly personal, [Sophronius] approaches the atrocity with nuance, courage, and urgency. An important piece of historical research [and] a display of significant poetic talent." -Electric Literature
"A stunning work by a keen poetic intellect. Writing at the intersection of history and remembrance, Sophronius contends with the multigenerational aftermath of state violence and the powerful forces of historical erasure. The ongoing inheritance Sophronius excavates in these lyrics is part-memory, part-burden, part-presence, part-silence. Each poem feels hard-won from the mysterious cultural machinery we call 'archive, ' lifted into astonishing, often heartbreaking, utterance. In its possession of the visual field of the page, in its formal rigor, and in its virtuosic expression, Interrogation Records invites us on a remarkable journey." -Kiki Petrisono, author, White Blood
"Lays bare a powerful affective archive of the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia and their aftermath...Sophronius [offers] insightful critiques of public perception, state ideologies, and propaganda while engaging numerous voices--scholarly, testimonial, ghostly, intimate...Interrogation Records is a search for the fragmented traces of memory that scatter present-day Indonesia." -Lara Norgaard, translator
"Stunning and powerful...holds art as a mirror to the heftiness of such trauma and reflects the delicacy that poetry must play in the national conversation." -Crispin Rodrigues, QLRS
"As far as I am aware, Interrogation Records is the only Anglophone poetry collection I have encountered that seeks to make the [Indonesian] massacres its thematic centrepiece." -Jonathan Chan, The Rumpus
"Sophronius leaves nothing-not mountain, not river, not recollection, to the imagination. The work is more than a signpost, it's a substantial gift to humanity and to memory." -Heavy Feather Review
