Anxiety Myths

by Afrizal Malna

Afrizal Malna sits apart from many of Indonesia’s recent poets. Not only is he a productive literary and theater critic, he is a novelists and short story writer as well. In a writing career that has now spanned more than thirty years, Afrizal has published several major collections of poetry. His poems have been translated into Dutch, German, and English, of which this is the first full length collection. Afrizal is concerned with a questioning of language and a bodily engagement with public and private space, things and their connotations and associations. It is through the appearance of everyday objects that Afrizal’s poems emerge as a repository of the cultural meanings of space and things in Indonesia’s everyday modernity. Afrizal’s poems, through drawing on practices of montage, precise diction and curious grammar, maintain a fine balance between consistency of style and variation in theme and subject which asserts his distinctive poetic voice. These are poems that trace the quickly changing urban trajectory of present day Indonesia.