Nicholas Jackson
University of Melbourne
University of Melbourne
Personal Doc. In her inaugural English collection of poems published by Yayasan Jurnal Perempuan, Yacinta affirms herself as an “activist, feminist, extremist and optimist” (“The United Nations of Me”) and she consolidates this throughout the volume. Yacinta’s writing is provocative, alive and fun and her poems are as critical and cynical as they are thoughtful and considerate. In this first collection she covers religion, sexuality, the 1965 massacre, pop culture, patriarchy, refugees, Asian identity and women’s rights. The stories told in the poems are honest and refuse to be ignored. The collection’s title To whom it may concern serves as the title for several poems in the collection that provide a gentle, but powerful and persistent voice for the survivors of the 1965 massacre that collectively and defiantly say: we have not forgotten. The other poems in the collection are sometimes autobiographical, sometimes a moving tribute, sometimes a lamentation and sometimes a celebration, but they are all powerful social commentaries. The poems in the collection are accompanied with equally beautiful illustrations by Dewi Candaningrum. Yacinta has established herself as everything she described in the "United Nations of Me" and more.
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