Interrogation Records: Poems

"Interrogation Records is 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 . . . Jeddie's great and significant ability, in his book, matches our great and significant need to learn more about the Indonesian killings of 65-66. So, I receive his 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: A Lyric of Virginia

"Lays bare a powerful affective archive of the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia and their aftermath . . . Sophronius takes on the more compelling, indeed the more pressing task of trying to understand and express how society remembers and forgets crimes of the state generations after that violence took place. Sophronius constructs a series of dialogues across the multi-layered discourse about 1965, offering 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