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.
Interrogation Records
Praise for Interrogation Records
In his poem “The Sinner’s Mantra” Jeddie quotes the adage from Karl Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program”: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” And if I may, I would say: 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, 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 of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia
