Document Shredding Museum

Indonesian poet Afrizal Malna’s Document Shredding Museum moves from intimate encounters between lovers and friends to mass environmental and semantic destruction, engaging with Javanese literary tradition and the archives of colonial and postcolonial violence. Drawing on a wide array of modes and moods, and colored always by Malna’s characteristic complex of dark humor, curiosity, and insight into the iniquitous social conditions of the global present, Document Shredding Museum proposes a poetics of uncertainty and wonder as it aims to make porous the ossified social imagination encoded in dominant regimes of language usage. Since the mid-1980s Malna has been respected as an innovator in the Indonesian literary tradition, and his extensive work in performance and visual art has deeply informed his poetics. First published in 2013, these poems explore Indonesian and global histories by reflecting on the mythic in the everyday and the everyday in the mythic. Document Shredding Museum is the first of Malna’s books to be published in the United States.

"Voices echo and shred in intermittent inventions, the torn presences of the pressure of realities, implosive, exuberant, blank. Afrizal Malna and his translator Daniel Owen offer verbal charms and social shards, bringing Indonesian into a transforming dialog with the anti-conventional poetries of North America." —CHARLES BERNSTEIN

"Afrizal Malna—one of Indonesia's best contemporary poets—challenges the subtle potential for authoritarianism that haunts all language acts. Daniel Owen's excellent translation maintains the poetic sensitivity of the original." —SYLVIA TIWON

"Finally Indonesian poetry translated into English by a real poet. Daniel Owen pays as much attention to the poetry of Afrizal as he does to his translation, reimagining and bridging the tingles in the spine of the originals into his own version of Afrizalian anxieties and madness." —MIKAEL JOHANI