Book
Apsara in New York
Apsara in New York is the debut poetry collection of Cambodian American poet Sokunthary Svay, first published in 2017.[1] Its poems follow a Khmer family from a refugee camp in Thailand to the Bronx, and then back to Phnom Penh, Battambang and Takeo.[2]
About the book
Svay is a Khmer writer and musician from the Bronx, nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her family came to the United States as refugees from Cambodia.[1][3][4]
The title joins the apsara, a figure from Khmer heritage, with the city life of New York.[4] Svay writes that the apsara is the mythical deity that decorates most Khmer temples and stands for the ideal woman in Cambodia. For her, the image of an apsara in New York meant her heritage and culture dropped into the rush of the city and its urban temples. She sees her work as a jarring meeting of old-world Cambodian tradition with the adjustment to the United States, the Bronx and New York City.[4]
The collection speaks from many perspectives and spans generations. It crosses the Pacific three times and draws its words from Cambodian history and from Western classical music.[3] Moving through childhood, adulthood and parenthood, the poems turn to immigration, family, cultural inheritance, music, war, genocide and grief, and to an identity formed between Cambodia and the United States.[1]
The poems
The book runs roughly in order of time. It begins with a Khmer family leaving Cambodia in 1980, during the Vietnamese occupation that followed the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime.[3] One of the first poems is "Jungle Crossing, 1980."[5] Once the family reaches the Bronx, the poems settle on the daughter, the book's main speaker. "No Others" shows that she is a version of Svay herself.[3]
The first half follows the speaker through childhood and adolescence, including her formal training as a classical singer. The Bronx poems are full of noise: Cambodian karaoke through a steel door, Jehovah's Witnesses ringing on weekends, midnight basketball games.[3] Palms come together in makeshift Bronx temples.[1] "The Khmer Speaks Through Palms" turns on the sompeah, the Khmer gesture of welcome in which the palms come together, and gives it both peaceful and violent images.[3] The mother is a strong voice in early poems such as "At Least Prostitutes Bring Home Money," "Make Room for Tenderness" and "Mother Monologue #1."[1]
Around the midpoint, in "Common Ground," the speaker returns as an adult to Phnom Penh and Takeo province. There an uncle says of her, in Khmer, that she can understand but cannot speak back.[3] In "Dear Grandmother," the grandmother shares eggs and somlau machou with the speaker on her last day in Phnom Penh.[1]
The final quarter returns to New York, where the speaker becomes a mother and raises a young daughter, Soriya.[3][1] The last poem in the mother's voice shows her posting a photograph on Facebook and learning to write "beautiful."[3] The book closes with "Don't Let Your Heritage Be Past Tense."[5]
Publication and editions
Willow Books, a division of Aquarius Press in Detroit, published the collection as a paperback on September 25, 2017, with ISBN 9780999223239 (ISBN-10 0999223232).[6][5] The paperback has 60 pages; one bookseller lists 62.[6][7] Svay presented the book at an Asian American Writers' Workshop reading at Poets House in New York City.[4]
Reception
The Asian American Writers' Workshop included the book in its October 2017 list of new books by Asian diasporic writers.[8] The writer Bunkong Tuon called the collection transnational and pan-ethnic in scope, and wrote that with it Svay emerges as a powerful new voice in Cambodian American poetry.[5][4] Kimiko Hahn placed it in a Cambodia "just barely post-Killing Fields but still abiding in the collective and particular nightmare of every survivor."[9] Prairie Schooner and Stirring both reviewed the book.[3][1]
Access
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Stirring
- ↑ AbeBooks: Apsara in New York, Sokunthary Svay
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 Prairie Schooner, Apsara in New York by Sokunthary Svay (review) (2018-08-02)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Willow Books, Apsara in New York by Sokunthary Svay (2017-08-09)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Barnes & Noble: Apsara in New York, Sokunthary Svay, paperback
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 New York Public Library Research Catalog: Apsara in New York, poems
- ↑ World of Books: Apsara in New York
- ↑ Asian American Writers' Workshop: October Bookmarks, 16 New Books by Asian Diasporic Writers (October 19, 2017)
- ↑ Aquarius Press: Apsara in New York