Love & Sambal

By Jeddie Sophronius

Seamus Heaney—like Jeddie Sophronius, a poet obsessed with writing a divided, stricken, and violently haunted motherland into existence, into sense—says that he writes “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” The narrator of Love & Sambal sojourns with mythic and deeply personal intention through the dark wood or night of the soul that is Indonesia’s almost Biblically plagued history of usurpation, prejudice, flood, drought, and erasure. Touch this book anywhere and you will touch everywhere its echoing darknesses, in stories of dislocation, exile, trauma, lost names and cultures, and of friends and lovers split by unreconcilable languages and beliefs. There is no darkness, however, without the idea, the hope, of light, and like the complex Indonesian chutney—sambal—of the book’s title, Sophronius’s is not a hopeless vision. This collection contains multitudes—the sweet, the sour, the pleasing, the bitter, offering a full palate of experience that the poet savors bravely out of abiding love for his “kind” and his country:  “crimson grind, soft skin / of a dried pepper, sprinkled with a taste / of lime—watery. Yes, I ask for all this.” —Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Paradise Close: A Novel