AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "CRUEL RADIANCE" BY ASIAN AMERICAN POET MONICA SOK



The poems that I feel are most powerful have to do with making something new. It has to do with subverting language. It has to do with subverting history. It has to do with breaking open something old and making something new out of it. I think that's when poems are most powerful and most resonant.

~ MONICA SOK, ON WRITING A NAIL THE EVENING HANGS ON, IN HER INTERVIEW WITH DANNY THANH NGUYEN FOR THE POETRY PROJECT ON MAY 20, 2020.


MONICA SOK, born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1990, is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of former refugees. Author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), she has received a "Discovery" Prize from 92Y. She is the recipient of fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Elizabeth George Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, Jerome Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Saltonstall Foundation, and others. Sok is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and teaches poetry to Southeast Asian youth at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California.



Photo Credit: The Chautauquan Daily



CRUEL RADIANCE BY MONICA SOK



I take the R from 86th St to teach poetry

in Manhattan. My hands sweat

on Cruel Radiance. The front cover: photograph of a girl


the Khmer Rouge executed, one of many

children presumed counterrevolutionary enemies,

as the soiled descendants of such. My chest heaves. To everyone


on the train I do not say, All the sobbing inside of me,

all of it you know now! But you don't know

what I am called! Aneakajun—traitor of my roots.


Instead, I catch the N across the platform, continue

reading about S-21, We were not inside

those prisons: they were. Our hells


almost certainly are not theirs. A white girl

with a streak of blue hair falls flat

on her back. Her head a bowling ball


close to my foot. Her head a bowling ball that rolls

on the floor. I look up

from reading cozy existential atmosphere (Adorno's



CRUEL RADIANCE continued



words) and there, a white girl on the ground—

breathing, breathing. Breathing.

Someone call 911! Someone press the emergency button!


Someone pull the girl up! Now

she is sitting, telling someone she's on her way

to 23rd St as the train screeches to my stop on 8th.


Doors open. I see how the distinction between

victim and executioner becomes blurred.

I want to cancel class. Because why? So I can sob


about the killing fields and how aneakajun feels?

I'd rather do that today. My head could be a bowling ball too.

I could fall over from this too.







SOURCE: A Nail the Evening Hangs On, poetry collection by Monica Sok, Copper Canyon Press, Washington, USA, 2020.