Document Shredding Museum

Personal and collective memory meet in Malna’s strong bilingual debut collection, which uses fragmented structures to reflect the disjointed nature of memory and history. Sentence diagrams, lists, unpunctuated verses, and words in boxes investigate philosophical and existential questions about language, while the bilingual format sheds light on Malna’s cultural reality. “Sharp Prison” and “Eraser’s Guest” use erasure and destruction, literal and figurative, with recurring metaphors of document shredding and references to historical violence and loss. In the title poem, Owen’s dynamic translations includes phrases such as “my bathroom bathing grammar” and “a tourist erupting in a dictionary,” emphasizing the interplay of ideas about language and identity. In the five-part “There’s No Meaning: A REPEATING POEM,” the text is broken into phrases that mimic the poet’s preoccupations with chaos and order. “I don’t know the difference anymore between/ a caress and bowing in prayer before your sadness,” Malna writes. Owen’s translation blends Indonesian and English, incorporating local cultural references and expressions like “Krakatau,” “betel chalk,” and “Javanese oxygen.” Language and history are innovatively rendered in this lush meditation. (May)