Literary News: Gaudy Boy announces new poetry title by Jeddie Sophronius

New York-based indie press Gaudy Boy announces new poetry title, Interrogation Records (April 2024), by the Chinese-Indonesian writer Jeddie Sophronius.

Breaking the silence and collective amnesia around the Indonesian mass killings of 1965. The winner of the 2023 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.

INTERROGATION RECORDS

Poems

Jeddie Sophronius

“A gift and a redress of silence.” —Divya Victor, winner of the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award

To this day, there exists in Indonesia a black hole of silence in acknowledging the 1965 mass killings as what they were—tragedy. Jeddie Sophronius’s Interrogation Records is a rare docupoetry collection that explores and calls into question the “official” narratives revolving around the massacre during this period of the Cold War.

Also known as “The Communist Purge,” the massacre resulted in the slaughter by the Indonesian army of members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and anyone accused of being affiliated to it—many of whom were Chinese and civilians. Throughout the collection, the voice of Sophronius’s speaker-researcher is quiet but always alert, contending with the aftermath of state violence and silencing, in a masterful blend of personal and collective history. Sophronius presents both authoritarian and artistic language on the same page, urging us to consider how documents, archives, and testimony may hold affective power and excavate a different truth.

Striking at a climate of silence and erasure, Interrogation Records is a remedy of collective amnesia.

Jeddie Sophronius is the author of Happy Poems & Other Lies (Codhill Press, 2024), Love & Sambal (The Word Works, 2024), and Blood·Letting (Quarterly West, 2023). A Chinese-Indonesian writer, educator, and translator, he received his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he served as the editor of Meridian. Their poems and prose have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, The Third Coast, and The Arkansas International. They currently live and teach in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Gaudy Boy,

An independent press publishing Asian Voices

Praise for INTERROGATION RECORDS

“Interrogation Records by Jeddie Sophronius . . . 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 implicates us at the arteries, it calls us into an enfleshed attachment. It enlivens the dead texts of archives, reanimates them so that we recall and revere the human lives that they document. . . . I see in Jeddie’s book a significant aspiration towards these important achievements. He is writing into the growing library of Asian writers in the United States whose literary work attends to genocide, war, and political incarceration, advancing both a journalistic and a research-oriented poetics within this diasporic formation. . . . 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.”

—Divya Victor, winner of the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award

“Interrogation Records is 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 Petrosino, author, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

“Interrogation Records lays bare a powerful affective archive of the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia and their aftermath. The poetry collection does not seek to depict the atrocity as an isolated historical event; Jeddie Sophronius instead 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. From reflections on identity and belonging to biting satire of euphemisms employed by the state to obscure fear, pain, and the striking elimination of human life, Interrogation Records is a search for the fragmented traces of memory that scatter present-day Indonesia.”

—Lara Norgaard, translator

INTERROGATION RECORDS: Poems By Jeddie Sophronius

April 1, 2024

ISBN 978-1-958652-07-7

$16.00 / Paperback / 120 pages / 5.5” x 8.5” Gaudy Boy

Distributed by Ingram

Publicity contact: Kimberley Lim klim@singaporeunbound.org

http://www.singaporeunbound.org/gaudyboy

Gaudy Boy,

An independent press publishing Asian Voices