A Nail the Evening Hangs On
Monica Sok
Copper Canyon: 2020
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These poems are probes into identity, into a selfhood framed by a conflicted culture: “cambodian//american … it’s a river I keep trying to cross …  except the river’s not there.” But those lower cases shift the terms beyond neat national labelling. It’s a cultural aporia that can’t be resolved in any trade-off of binary terms: “how cambodian//American feels in Lancaster or Brooklyn or about earlier this morning on the subway.” Lancaster is the town in Pennsylvania, USA, where Monica Sok grew up, a daughter of refugees from Cambodia. Her poems grapple with the present American experience of the Cambodian diaspora, the insistent pressures of its collective memory and the historic role of the United States in escalating the Cambodian genocide in the years of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

No surprise, then, that the personal is political. No surprise either that the past is still present. Yet these aren’t poems of political analysis or emigré propaganda, for all that there are some with agitprop titles like “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia”, “The Death of Pol Pot” and “ABC for Refugees”. Sok doesn’t try to totalise what’s at stake, and there’s little that’s reductive or formulaic here. Rather, she immerses herself imaginatively in the language and the silences of her family, in their memory bank and the institutionalised history of the war museums she visits, their artefacts and taxonomies, even constructing a “self-portrait as war museum captions”.

The poems come grouped into three sections, though the sections are porous in their recurring imagery and interplay of voices, and if there’s a sense of the repetitive, it’s because the poems circle round the core preoccupations. The section headings might suggest a movement from the startling and the deeply unsettled to the more composed — from “Americans Dancing in the Heart of Darkness” to “The Book of Spung” and then to “Evening” — but the restlessness, the interrogations permeate all the poems, whether through the poet’s direct subjectivity or through a set of shape-shifting personae. The “I” of many of the poems isn’t the poet speaking but comes out of a palimpsest of imagined voices.

• Tags: Cambodia, Issue 18, Michael Freeman, Monica Sok